Actually, not entirely true. Try typing command plus the first character of the choice you want. I lucked into this discovery by chance, and have found it to work almost every time I have used it. Of course, it doesn’t work too well when two buttons begin with the same letter.

“The Apple Mail convention doubles the number of keystrokes required to paste a paragraph in the correct position, and does so for no reason that I can discern.”

Since you’re a true keyboard junkie, have you yet twigged to the fact that OS X honors a surprisingly complete basic set of emacs commands? If you want to move a paragraph, ^K it, ^N down to its new position, and then ^Y it. If you prefer this sort of interaction with the computer (and I sometimes do), you can pretty much go wild with it.

The original Windows was perhaps designed without being able to assume a mouse, but Windows 95 assumed a 2 button mouse and designed it that way, and even though Macs have shipped with multi-button mice for years now, the Mac OS can operate just fine with a single-button mouse if you so choose. The extra buttons are there for convenience and are NOT REQUIRED in order to use the OS. If there are any apps that require a second button on a mouse, they’re not following Apple’s UI Guidelines.

I guess this is the point where I mention that I’ve been a Mac developer for two decades and an iPhone developer since the beginning.

To the author: not for nothing, but a Mac is not a Windows box and perhaps you should give a little bit of time and make a lot fewer assumptions. A lot of what’s in the Mac is there specifically for Windows users to learn their way around (e.g., in the System Preferences app, in the Search field, type in “wallpaper” and it will direct you to the Desktop & Screensaver Preference Pane–on the Mac, it’s not called Wallpaper, it’s called the Desktop Picture).

Apple’s UI Guidelines have always been far more consistent when it comes to keyboard shortcuts. cmd-period has always been cancel, no matter where you see Cancel. In a Save sheet or dialog, cmd-period will cancel the sheet. cmd-D is the same as [D]on’t Save. Return or Enter always enacts the default button. Always.

Apple’s developers are overwhelmingly strict adherers to Apple’s UI guidelines because if they’re not, they hear it from their users and their sales suffer. Microsoft is the biggest violator of Macintosh UI Guidelines and has been from the off.

There’s never going to be a single perfect solution for everyone. Personally, I can’t imagine banging on arrow keys to position a cursor at the beginning of a paragraph, then hitting shift option down-arrow, then cmd-x, then banging arrow keys to reposition the cursor, then cmd-v to be more efficient than just triple-clicking ANYWHERE in a paragraph and dragging it to the new position.

And I type at least as fast as you do.

Good thing both options are available. (and Shift Option Down-arrow worked for me in TextMate,but it did include an extra CRLF in the selection).

Did you know that in Keyboard Preference Pane you can create your own Keyboard Shortcuts for any app you want?

Did you also know that on laptop keyboards and the compact apple keyboards you can set the default behavior of the function keys to be function keys and not hardware keys? meaning that if you end up using them more as f1-f12 keys more often than you use them in iTunes or to change the audio volume or display brightness, you can reverse the default behavior so, say, you wouldn’t have to hit fn+ctrl+f2 to get keyboard menus, just ctrl+f2. (you would, however, have to then hit fn+ctrl+f2 to turn up the brightness of your display).

Please realize you’re working in parts of the UI where yo’ure wanting extremely customized behavior and, well, you’ll have to customize things a bit! But there are UI elements there for you to do such customizations.

and if you can’t find what you’re looking for, go to the forums and ask. or go to versiontracker.com and search for third party utilities that expose or add behaviors to the OS that give you what you want.

(by the way, did you know that everywhere that CoreText (the Mac OS text system) is in use (most everywhere i can think of except in FireFox), if you put the mouse cursor over a word whose definition you do not know, hold down command and control and hit the D key. Or click the secondary button (usually the right button) on the mouse and choose “dictionary lookup) and you’ll get a popup with the definition of the word. As I said, that works in almost every app on the system. Safari, TextEdit, Mail…

I absolutely agree with your observations here. I haven’t used Mac much, but the first thing I looked for when I did use it was how the keyboard shortcuts were organized, and I realized that one needs to use the mouse a lot more on a Mac than they would on Windows.

I am one of those who types at close to 90 words a minute, and being in the content business, keyboard operability is more than essential for me; it’s something I can’t live without.

Fortunately, Linux is a lot more streamlined these days so I don’t have that problem.

Best
Kushal

I’ve been using Windows since it became usable (i.e., verison 3 – 1990). I owned a Mac SE for a few years but never used it much for two reasons.

The first, and more trivial reason, was the single-button Macintosh mouse. Lame. (And I could, but won’t, mention that System 7 didn’t have ‘sticky’ menus.)

Second, I could drive a Windows system completely from the keyboard (ignoring things like image editing programs). As you point out, that’s much faster than requiring a mouse.

Modern Macs and Mac applications have done a lot to address this problem – but not to the degree that Windows & Win apps have, as far as I know.

The point that Apple needs to emulate is this: when its designers were first laying out Windows, one of their criteria was that the system could *not* rely on having a mouse available. Hence the universality and commonality in Windows keyboard handling.

I’m sure their motive was to make Window work on legacy DOS systems that may not have had mice but the result went beyond that.