I love using a Mac. I also love shortcuts and the vast array of shortcuts that Mac apps provide (especially Textmate).
What I don’t love is the fact that every application has its own shortcut for similar tasks.
Switching windows or views:
| Textmate | Cmd + Shift + Left or Right | (in Project mode) |
| Adium | Cmd + Left or Right | |
| Firefox | Cmd + Option + Left or Right | |
| Safari | Cmd + Shift + Left or Right | |
Granted they’re all fairly similar, but it’s still a huge annoyance. I don’t see why one way is better than the other and why developers couldn’t have stuck with one combination.
Are we in need of a Mac shortcut standard?
Favorite unified shortcuts (most set by the operating system):
| Window switching within the same app | Cmd + ` | (tilda) |
| Preferences in every app | Cmd + , | (comma) |
| Closing windows | Cmd + W | |
| Opening new tabs in browsers | Cmd + T |
It’s all good and dandy until you’re accidentally focused on a wrong application (Mail, Adium, others) and same shortcut brings up a Fonts dialogue, which is then not closable by Cmd + W shortcut because it’s not actually a window. UGH!?
I agree. This is something that annoyed Mac users for a while now and it doesn’t seem that hard to solve.
Seems like a simple design pattern should help guide the developers.
Then again, nobody really follows the patterns or standards anyway :p
Yeah this really pisses me off. I got so used to the Firefox tab switch keys I cannot use Safari anymore. And I definitely always accidentally open the font window that isn’t a window in Adium every few minutes. I found out hitting cmd+T again will close it, which is nice.
@Tim: Wow, never knew about the double Cmd+T! Thanks a ton
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7 months ago
This has annoyed me for a while. I think some guidelines need to be laid down by Apple.