Keyboard tricks from a macOS app dev

I find it fascinating that your examples are actually the readline/emacs shortcuts, or the workarounds that had to be implemented for the lack of PC keys (Home/End/PgUp/PgDown)

The more I got familiar with MacOS, the more I realized all those feature pictures ople praise MacOS for are just workarounds / copies from other systems, and (even power-) users just aren't familiar with other systems hence their amaze.

The inconsistencies that come with intermixing ctrl-option-command are just mind blowing. Even Windows got this right by making the Windows key control window manager specific actions.

Lots of those shortcuts are basically Emacs shortcuts. I’m always sad using gdocs on Linux that they don’t support the Emacs shortcuts.

I love these built in shortcuts. I’ve added Karabiner to remap caps lock to esc and ctrl (not for Vim) and also right cmd-hjkl for instant arrow key access.

Spotlight usually works for most of my needs as well.

It’s frustrating when an app overwrites built in shortcuts like in Intellij on Mac, searching for shortcuts in the menu bar search doesn’t allow opt-delete if I remember correctly.

Speaking of menu bar search… one of my favorite commands is opt-shift-/ to search available commands in the menu bar of an app.

It's much better to rebind all of those to more ergonomic alternatives that match your other apps using the tools listed (eg, to similar cursor keys you use in a text editor), which is also useful for non Macs you use (where you could do the same rebunds), rather then learning yet another set of bad old combos

sizeup is excellent. add swish and it's even better.

It's a sore-spot for sure. I've found that Rectangle[0] does a good enough job.

[0] https://rectangleapp.com/

As a more general suggestion, macOS likely isn’t good at imitating what you previously had, try to understand the workflow they’re proposing, adapt and learn it, it generally gets second nature and pretty decent soon enough, getting to work the way you envision is not apple’s strong suit.

I don’t really tile windows much. The main case where I do is with a bunch of terminal windows. Most of what I get out of a tiling window manager is full screen by default and easy keys to switch workspaces.

On macOS the thing that drives me insane is that the many-finger swipe to switch desktops won’t focus the target window until the animation is totally done (like 0.7s after starting). I wish it works like cmd+tab which changes focus instantly. Apart from that I guess I’m not that bothered because I mostly just full screen things. Emacs and iterm2 can do their own tiling of windows.

I suspect the constant emphasis on mouse use, ever since the first Macintosh, has created an attitude of "keyboard doesn't matter"; I've noticed that even early Windows is very usable with only a keyboard (the Alt, underlined letters, and arrow keys method is particularly well-designed), whereas e.g. classic MacOS is basically unusable without a mouse.

In later versions they added keyboard access, but it still feels like it was done as a bare-minimum concession and not originally planned.

I’ll just throw Magnet in the ring for a tiling solution.

I have keyboard shortcuts well in muscle memory now for left/right third/half/two-thirds, and all four corners at a quarter of screen, and full screen. I find that meets 90% of my needs.

Left/right two-thirds is my go-to when coding on 14”. VSCode on the left, Safari on the right. Both big enough to work well, but both leave enough of the other visible to be useful.

Nice little app, costs some reasonable amount of money as a one-off purchase.

You can mimic that in part with yabai (https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai). Disabling SIP gets you instant Space switching and creating without animation just like Pop_OS.

But you can get very far to an automated tiling WM and keyboard navigation even without disabling SIP.

As another suggestion, Better Touch Tool does great for tiling window manager and adding shortcuts.

It's one of the first things I always need. It started coming from Linux with a similar experience to you.

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A big shortcut for me is cmd+shift+/

It allows searching on all submenus. So when I'm working on an IDE for example, it's how I find those obscure options I know are there but I don't use frequently enough to remember the shortcut.

I use NixOS+GNOME+pop-shell for tiling windows on Linux, and I love it!

I am quite frequently on MacOS, and I use Yabai[0] and skhd[1], managed with Nix-Darwin[2] for tiling windows and custom keyboard shortcuts. With how I make my Linux and MacOS builds look and feel identical it's pretty easy for me to forget when I'm on one vs the other.

For anyone curious, here's my repository for deploying my configs[3]. It's awesome to have one source of truth for managing NixOS servers and workstations, MacOS workstations, and other Linux workstations with Nix installed.

[0] https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai

[1] https://github.com/koekeishiya/skhd

[2] http://daiderd.com/nix-darwin/

[3] https://github.com/heywoodlh/nixos-configs

I don't think this proves anything. For example there is a massive difference between people using shortcuts in an everyday application, people used to Vim/Emacs/whatever to a point they can do the basics without thinking about them, and people who actually customized their setup for their workflow.

And to me it looks like they only focused on the first case because of sentences like this:

> It takes two seconds to decide upon which special-function key to press

Yes, I can definitely believe that I wouldn't be faster than a mouse user if I had to select text with a keyboard in notepad or press Ctrl-Alt-whatever to do simple tasks. But good luck beating a proficient Vim user at anything that has to do with cursor movements, search/replace or repetitive steps - watch a competitive coder use Vim and see how often it takes them "two seconds to decide" to do anything.

I think overall people have a decent intuition about what the more efficient way to control an application is. I frequently use the mouse/touchpad too, because in many GUIs it's simply faster and you can feel that even when you start out focused on the keyboard. Often users switch between window management and using graphical applications, and in those cases leaving the hand on the mouse is the more convenient approach.

And lastly - does it even matter? When someone perceives a certain approach to be faster or smoother, then why not let them? In almost all cases the speed difference doesn't matter.

I wonder in what conditions this is true for.

I can imagine that moving the mouse to open an app from the macOS dock is about the same speed as using the Cmd+Space or some shortcut.

I can't imagine using the mouse to go to the start/end of line is quicker than using an easy to reach keyboard shortcut to do so.

I'd also wonder about differences in general computing literacy/etc. between 1989 and now. -- I'm not sure "people new to the mouse" describes a meaningful subset of professional computer users these days.

You might want to read this about that study: https://danluu.com/keyboard-v-mouse/

It's a counter-intuitive conclusion because it's a wrong conclusion.

Author here, I use the native macOS replacements as well, mostly because they sync with iOS and they save me a lot of typing on iPhone and iPad.

But Raycast works differently in that:

    - it has dynamic replacements (see the video where I use ,td to type today's date for example)
    - can place cursor somewhere inside the replacement
    - makes it easy to add new snippets (Cmd-S on copied text)
    - is a lot faster in general and can work inside words as well

Thank you, I'm really happy to read you find rcmd so useful ^_^ Also came from i3wm and missed it sorely until I finally settled on rcmd + single-space.

Using multiple spaces on macOS is nowhere as easy as on i3.

Yeah my most recent discovery is using GPT4 to create applescripts which are triggered by a key combination. One that I use all the time is to open a chrome window with a specific profile to certain webpages

Yes! I'm sure I'm not using it anywhere close to its full potential, but just being able to two-finger tap a link to open it in a new tab is huge.

What are your favorite shortcuts?

It stopped working in safari too (for picking items from the dropdown of suggestions when you type into the address bar). Even if you edit `DefaultKeybinding.dict`, some of the bindings just don't take. Also broken in some places is 'alt-b' and 'alt-f' for forward and backward word movement. I've been remedying this with BetterTouchTool, but it isn't the same in some places.

Try Shortcut Detective. https://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/labs/

I haven’t used it for a couple of years, so it may be flakey, but worth a shot.

Yep, Apple added a lot of options for configuring zooming. I went through all the Accessibility settings multiple times to find something that works for me. I used three-finger-double-tap for a while, but I really like three-finger-tap for middle click so it clashed with that.

That's why I eventually settled for the rcmd-lcmd sequence, it's much more convenient for me and doesn't clash with my other bindings.

Just finding the app native ones can be useful, I spent several years using macOs before someone told me about apple-spacebar bringing up a spotlight quick search, which is not the main way I launch things that aren't terminal commands.