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Option key
Authored by: englabenny on Apr 22, '03 11:10:50AM

Really good feature of OS X especially that you in many places really get more options if you press the options key, like when quitting apps from the dock.

It's frustrating though that much is undocumented and not even hinted by the UI. Maybe you can find more good stuff if you go through whole of the system with the option key pressed. ?



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Re: Option key
Authored by: englabenny on Apr 22, '03 11:23:05AM

Woa, check what a little idea can do; I found eight menu selections in Finder that perform diffrently with option key. (Open the file menu, for instance, and see what changes when you press option).

I didn't know they were so many, like two diffrent types of info window, or minimize all. Minimize all is a global feature of the Window menu, but only finder seems to change menu text as option is pressed and does respond to it as shortcut, ie it works in Camino and Terminal but doesn't display "Minimize all" and cmd-opt-M does nothing.



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Re: Option key
Authored by: tim1724 on Apr 22, '03 02:26:08PM

The menu items don't change in Camino or Terminal because those are Cocoa programs and unfortunately Apple hasn't yet added cool features such as the dynamic menu item changing to Cocoa yet. (It's possible to get at these features in Cocoa by using an undocumented way of getting at the Carbon menu, but it's not a safe thing to do so you won't see many Cocoa programs doing it.)

Hopefully Apple will add cool stuff like this to Cocoa in 10.3 (they've said that eventually everything will work in both environments, but in Jaguar there are still a lot of things which are Cocoa-only or Carbon-only)

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Tim Buchheim



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Re: Option key
Authored by: gklinger on Apr 22, '03 05:32:31PM

As an additional note, you don't have to hold the option key
down before you select a menu. Go to the Finder and click on
File. Let the menu hang open and then press option and watch
for changes. It makes finding these undocumented features a lot
easier.



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Re: Option key
Authored by: englabenny on Apr 22, '03 05:59:57PM

Yes, which ofcourse was the way I did the fast check, even though I did not state it.



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