Are there any guidelines for which controls in mac apps should be able to take the focus, by navigating to them by hitting the tab key?
I just checked the system preferences app, and barely any controls seem to do this - for example, in the "Displays" section, the only two that take the focus are the search box and list of resolutions. Is it expected that the other controls cannot be manipulated with the keyboard, or is there some other way?
This behaviour is a user setting governed by System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts:
Related
I have recently moved from Windows 10 to MacOS Big Sur. On Windows, I used AutoHotkey for system-wide automatic text replacement. For example:
(alpha) would turn into α
(beta) would turn into β
Is it possible to do a similar thing using Automator on Mac? I'm not interested in app-specific settings, as I would like this to work in all apps. Not being familiar with the OS, I am struggling to figure it out, and Google/Apple Documentation have been no help!
Thanks
Go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Text and add your substitutions, as show in the image further below.
You can get to System Preferences from the Apple menu, far left of the menu bar, or from Spotlight pressing the commandspace bar keyboard shortcut and start typing System Preferences, or from the Dock clicking on the System Preferences icon, as shown below.
I have a Cocoa application. In the View menu, the system adds an Enter Full Screen menu item. In other applications I see that this menu item has the keyboard shortcut ^⌘F. However in my application this keyboard shortcut is not shown in the menu and unsurprisingly this key combination does not enter full screen.
Interestingly, this keyboard shortcut, although shown in other applications, does not work.
How do I debug and/or fix this?
Any new Xcode application should get the View menu with Enter Full Screen already setup.
You can add the Key command in the Attributes Inspector.
If the key command doesn't work in ANY application, then that's likely a non-programming problem: most likely a conflict with a duplicate key command that's been configured.
Check System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > App Shortcuts.
How can I unbind Command-Control-Space from Mac OS X 10.9?
This shortcut shows Special Characters table and conflicts with my Emacs key binding, and I couldn't disable it from System Preference->Keyboard->Shortcuts.
Thanks.
At least on macOS Sierra to macOS Big Sur ⌃Space is the default binding for Select the previous input source which is on by default (even if only one input source is activated).
You can free it by:
Open System Preferences
Go to Keyboard > Shortcuts > Input Sources
Untick "Select the previous input source"
Afterwards, you should be able to bind it as expected.
You can create custom keyboard shortcuts for most app's menubar choices in System Preferences. If a desired key combination is losing precedence to a default shortcut that you don't use and can't easily disable, simply override it with a new, unobtrusive shortcut.
Open System Prefs / Keyboard / Shortcuts. Select App Shortcuts from the left pane. Toggle the All Applications category's triangle in the main window to point downward (if it's not open already).
If there's an item named Emoji & Symbols* shown there, then click its shortcut combination and enter a new shortcut (such as option-shift-command-t, in this case).
If there's not an item named Emoji & Symbols under All Applications, click the + button at the bottom, type or copy-paste Emoji & Symbols, and then enter a new keyboard shortcut (option-shift-command-t, or anything really). This will free the control-command-space combination for you to use as a specialized shortcut elsewhere.
To remove your custom shortcut, just click to highlight it in the main window of this preference pane, and click the – button at the bottom. The custom shortcut will disappear and the default action will resume.
*Note: On versions older than Mac OS 10.10.3, the menu item is called Special Characters… instead of Emoji & Symbols.
I don't know of any way to disable this, but an alternative option might be to create a shortcut for the app you want to use that in. I created a Command-Control-Space shortcut for Chrome and now Command-Control-Space doesn't bring up the special character palette anymore in Chrome.
failing that you may be better off asking in Apple Stackexchange
I am working on a dedicated keyboard shortcut controller for a specific app, Avid's Pro Tools. There is a default keyboard shortcut that toggles the view of two windows, "Mix" and "Edit."
Both of these commands have entries on the Window menu in the app. However, there is a little check next to the window that is active, and a little diamond next to the window that isn't. So these switch as the window is toggled (by the single keyboard shortcut).
I'm looking for a way to program a different key using the Mac OS System Application shortcuts. When I assign a new keyboard shortcut to the "Mix" and "Edit" menu items, I don't get the toggle behavior, it just causes the first item in the menu to be active. This makes sense, as it is getting two commands at once. To get the behavior I want now I have to use two keyboard shortcuts, which breaks a UI convention in Pro Tools. Any suggestions appreciated!
In Windows, in any windows form or web browser, you can use the tab button to switch focus through all of the form fields.
It will stop on textboxes, radiobuttons, checkboxes, dropdown menus, etc.
However, in Mac OSX, tab skips dropdown menus. Is there anyway to change this behavior, or access the above items mentioned, without using a mouse?
Go to System Preferences > Keyboard and Mouse, then choose Keyboard Shortcuts. At the bottom, ensure Full Keyboard Access is set to "All controls". It's a long time since I turned it on but I think that's all you need to do
Apple Menu > System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Keyboard Shortcuts:
Change the radio button at the bottom from "Text boxes and lists only" to "All controls."
Edit: Dammit. We're a fast group around here aren't we? :-)
I have found that I also need to set accessibility.tabfocus to 7 in Firefox's about:config.
It's in the System Preferences - this blog post shows where the setting is.