Improve Top Menu Navigating by Keyboard

bobbymac333bobbymac333
Posted:
in macOS edited January 2014
I have been adopting more of a keyboard navigation in both my Mac and my PC and I'm seeing some short-comings that could be improved on OS X. When a menu is opened (by hitting key command for "Focus on Menu") over a certain catagory, you can hit the first letter of the item and it selects. But if there are more than one with say the letter "t" and you choose this, the selection gets stuck at the first one. Hitting the "t" again should go to the next item starting with "t" but as it is it sometimes goes to an arbitrary item, sometimes not even by that letter.



They've adopted this menu navigation from PC in the first place anyways so I think they should pay attention to finishing the job. It is a great method in XP and one of it's strengths.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 2
    texas floodtexas flood Posts: 37member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by bobbymac333

    But if there are more than one with say the letter "t" and you choose this, the selection gets stuck at the first one. Hitting the "t" again should go to the next item starting with "t" but as it is it sometimes goes to an arbitrary item, sometimes not even by that letter.



    It looks like the OS performs menu item name completion. If you bring up a File menu and type "p", "Page Setup" will be selected. If you instead type "pr", "Print" will be selected. If you type "pa", "Page Setup" will be selected. I have been able to type "Save As" in TextEdit's file menu and get the expected result.



    I will agree that there is some really arbitrary behavior though. Typing a "w" in Safari's File menu selects "Save As".
  • Reply 2 of 2
    bobbymac333bobbymac333 Posts: 23member
    Hey thanks, that's a great tip. I only checked the Finder and Explorer so far but that's better than I knew before.



    You could still add a cycle through "s" names, for instance, when hitting key a second and third time and not conflict with the current method (how many words start with "s-s"?). I currently work on both platforms everyday and I appreciate Apple's attempts to incorporate PC habits into the OS X without letting it get in the way of their vision.
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