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scripting / Scripting-News

I'm starting to use GitHub for work on my blog. Why not? It's got good communication and collaboration tools. Why not hook it up to a blog?
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⌘` is reserved for the last 20 years. #148

Open ttepasse opened 4 years ago

ttepasse commented 4 years ago

Hi,

(Sorry for posting here. I don't know what is your current preferred form of feedback on your blog posts.)

Since the introduction of Mac OS X in 2000 the keyboard shortcut ⌘` was reserved by the system, to cycle between the open windows of the current application. It is so stated in the current Human Interface Guidelines and looking back on my archive of HIGs also in earlier guidelines. The earliest PDF I have is from 2005 but in my memory the convention is far older.

And it's also a big user expectation: If an app runs on MacOS I expect it to behave in this way, because my fingers memorized and trained with this shortcut for the last 20 years across hundreds of apps.

And there is another argument to be made here: I'm using a german keyboard layout. As a result I'm using ⌘< as a shortcut. The place of the ` key on the US layout is taken by the < key on the german layout. The ` key is far on the top right instead of the convenient place on the bottom left. In my experience the best practice for internationalisation of keyboard shortcuts is to stick to safe combinations of ⌘ + [a-zA-Z0-9].

Anyway. Sorry for your problem, but maybe that is an explanation why you'll find ⌘` suddenly taken anywhere: it always was. 🙃

scripting commented 4 years ago

Thanks for the update, but I believe our use of Cmd-` predates all of that, believe it or not. Never mind, Electron is going to do what it wants to do and doesn't care what I think, same with Chrome.

scripting commented 4 years ago

Also probably the best way to do this is to, if you have a blog, post it there, and send me a link. If you don't have a blog, there are plenty of places that offer free hosting. But this way works too.