Mac basics for Windows users: Menus
I bought my first Mac a few months ago. Having been a dyed-in-wool Windows user (and a former Microsoft employee) meant that I was apprehensive about my ability to be productive with Mac OS. The fact that Macs can now run Windows (both natively under Boot Camp and virtualized), made the decision easy – I was buying a Mac for the hardware not for the OS.
Cut to the present and Mac OS feels as natural as Windows once did. I use it for almost all of my time and haven’t “natively” booted into Windows for over six months. There is one small thing that I still miss though – the way you can access menus using keyboard in Windows (e.g. Alt+F for getting to the File menu). Mac does have concept of keyboard accelerators – where an individual menu option is tied to a keystroke combo (e.g. Ctrl+T opens a new tab in IE and maps to Command+T in Safari), but it lacks an easy way to jump to an application’s pull-down menu. Here are a couple of workarounds:
Goto System Prefrences and under Keyboard & Mouse, check the “Use all F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys” option.
On the new keyboards that come with iMacs, F1 and F2 control brightness while F3 invokes exposé. Checking this option will make them behave as regular function keys. You can still access their extended functions (e.g. F1 to reduce brightness), by holding down the fn key and then pressing the function key.
Next, click the Keyboard Shortcuts tab and check the Keyboard Navigation option plus everything underneath it.
Close Keyboard & Mouse preferences dialog.
Pressing Ctrl+F2 should now place the focus on the menu bar of the currently active application (press Ctrl+F1 before Ctrl+F2 in case Ctrl+F2 doesn’t work the first time). The Apple menu will always be selected by default and you can type the first letter of the menu option that you want to reach. For example, Type E to reach Edit, F to reach File and so on. You can even type more than one character to reach the right option (e.g. Fo to reach Format as the first letter conflicts with File). You can press the Down Arrow key or Enter to open the pull-down menu or use the Right and Left Arrow keys to move between different menu options.
The other keyboard trick you can use to get to a menu is through the help menu. Pressing Command+Shit+? will place you inside the “Search” box under the Help menu. Type the option that you are looking for, say “Open” (sans the quotes) and you’ll be presented with a list of options that begin with Open. Press the down arrow key to highlight an item in this list and the corresponding menu option will automatically be revealed and selected! In Safari, it’ll even search the History menu allowing you to quickly jump to a page you’ve visited before.
Unfortunately this trick doesn’t work with all applications. Firfox is the biggest culprit here. Command+Shift+? takes you to Mozilla support page in FireFox3 – a minor but annoying oversight.