On Thu, Sep 08, 2005 at 11:07:25AM -0700, M. Bitner wrote: > > A lot of things that are ctrl-key in Windows are cmd-key in MacOS X. Cut, > > copy, and paste for example. I don't find it hard to use ctrl-x vs cmd-x > > when I sit down at a wintendo or wintendow wannabe (Gnome, KDE, etc), > > though I am always trying to alt-w to close a window. > > One of the things I find frustrating about a Mac is that the keyboard > shortcuts aren't consistent from application to application. They seem > to assume you'll always be using a mouse, or at least that you don't > need to be able to do everything from the keyboard.
Yeah, I had that complaint for a long time as well. Office behaves more or less like it does in Windows, but most other apps tend to be kinda weak in the keyboard control. There are thankfully some exceptions like QuickSilver which, when combined with bash effectively keeps me from having to use Finder or Dock unless I actually want a mouseyclickey interface. Pages and Keynote are the only two apps I've seen from Apple that really have keyboard users in mind, and Keynote is going to be rather mousey regardless because it's a visual sort of thing. Office is also reasonably keyboardable, but as you note Microsoft is a great example of the very inconsistant keybindings--they largely do their own thing. The biggest offender to behaving consistently with the keyboard is probably Mozilla, whose keybindings are very different on the Mac so that they are more like Safari--except they're not really. Frustrating. > Another difficulty I had in switching at first, which is mildly > embarrassing to admit, is that I could not figure out how to install > software I'd downloaded. I had to have a coworker who was a former Mac > programmer show me that I needed to drag and drop the app to the > Applications folder, although at least it had the side effect of > providing him with a considerable amount of amusement. I can picture this one too--I escaped it only because I had some NeXTish background and have encouraged that kind of structure in a few cross-platform things I work on (for that reason, actually..) > > The open source world is full of programmer's editors. Most of them > > run on OSX, and all of them are free and Free. If you want specific > > recommendations, let us know what features you want (or what > > commercial editors you've liked). We've got plenty of opinions! (-: > > Ruby support and Subversion integration, mostly. And how comfortable > it is to use, which of course is fuzzy and not at all helpful in > communicating what I want. :) At work we use Textpad, which I like > okay. On my Linux box I use Kate. I am open to recommendations for OS > X ( including vi(?m)/emacs :). I'm with you on the svn thing. Now that you can effectively aviud dbm hosage, subversion is simple, practical, and makes CVS look like the fossil that it is. _______________________________________________ EUGLUG mailing list euglug@euglug.org http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug
