10.5: Use Help to speed keyboard nav of menu bar

Nov 09, '07 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

Mac OS X has long lagged behind Windows in terms of being able to control the menu with a keyboard. There's no Alt + underlined letter, for instance. Instead, at best, you had a clunky ^F2 "switch focus to menu bar," along with a load of arrow presses. Now there's a new solution, using a well-known feature of Leopard -- its new improved help menu.

Press Command-Shift-/ to go to the Help menu, tap in the first few letters of the command you want to use, and it will pop up in a Spotlight-esque manner. Press the down arrow key to select it and press Enter. That's usually about five or six key presses, and far beats the mouse for fast typers.

[robg adds: To be fair, 10.4 had a decent keyboard navigation system for the menu -- press Control-F2 to select the menu bar, then type a couple letters of the main menu item's name (Ed), press the down arrow to select the highlighted menu (Edit), then type a few letters of the command's name (Co), and then press Return to activate it (Copy, in this case). If you had similarly named menu items, though, you'd have to type quite a few characters to select the right one, or resort to the arrow keys. The 10.5 method is faster, but you'll need to remember the command's name, as you can't display the top-level menus' contents via the help system.]

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