Consistency Desired

Available shortcuts for MarsEdit windows

It’s sometimes easy to pick on the various Windows operating systems and gloat about how great OS X is. But in reality, OS X has failings and issues of its own.

I’ve written in the past about the behavior of application windows in OS X. Coming from a MS Windows1 background and moving to OS X, there have been a few inconsistencies that have irked me over the past few years I’ve been using an Apple computer.

I find it annoying and perplexing that there is no consistent pattern for the usage of keyboard shortcuts. In particular, the use of certain number keys in combination with the Command key to navigate to various windows within one application is greatly inconsistent. Allow me to illustrate:

Mail.app is open and running on my Macbook, but I have no window open for that application. I want to open Mail to browse through a folder of messages. Rather than use the mouse to click on Mail’s dock icon, I want to use a keyboard shortcut. To do so I perform the following: Command+Tab through my open applications until I highlight Mail.app then type Command+1. This sequence will open up the primary Mail.app window, allowing me to browse through my folders and their contained messages.

Coming from the Windows world, I tend to close almost all windows except for the one I’m working in. Call it a bad habit, an eccentricity … I don’t care. All I know is that I feel more organized when I don’t have a plethora of windows scattered across my screen. So when I want to use a running application, I always want to use a keyboard combination to get into the window desired.

The issue is that there is no consistent mapping of the Command+Number Key from application to application for opening the various windows available in any application. After a perusal through the Apple HIG, I found nothing pertaining to this subject either—I focused mainly on the sections focused on windows and keyboard shortcuts.

It seems to be that mapping these shortcuts is left to the developer with no guidance from Apple. Indeed, even in their own suites of applications—whether iLife or the apps bundled with OS X—there is no consistency in this area2. Here is a table of shortcuts that illustrate the various options between certain applications. I’ve included some of Apple’s software as well as well developed third party applications3.

Application Shortcut Result
Mail.app Command+1 Opens main Mail window.
iCal Command+0 Opens main iCal window.
iChat Command+1 Opens the buddy list in your first account.
iTunes Alt+Command+1 Opens main iTunes window
MarsEdit Command+1 Opens main MarsEdit window.
Evernote Command 0 Opens the Evernote activity window. There is no option for the main Evernote window. It simply appears on the screen as soon as you Command+Tab to it and does not follow many OS X interface conventions.
Yojimbo Command+1 Opens main Yojimbo window.
Things Command+1 Opens Things

The issue I have is this: because of the inconsistency, the user is forced to remember the shortcuts available in each application he/she uses. Every so often I will Command+Tab to an application I don’t use regularly and will have to pause … what key combo do I use now? It’s a small thing, but enough small things over the day slow you down and lead to frustration on the part of the user. And it would be a slight understatement to say that Mac users care about the interface.

The premise of having interface guidelines is to give the user consistency and predictability. There are already more than enough keyboard combinations that we users have to memorize. It would be nice if items like this were not on that list.

  1. for the remainder of this article, upper case Windows will represent the operating systems offerings of Microsoft and lower case windows will refer to OS X application windows. []
  2. iWork is not included here as this discussion really only applies to application based windows rather than document based windows. The applications in the iWork suite really only involve document windows and their various panels. []
  3. I’ve really come to appreciate third party developers who do their best to adhere to the standards even when it seems Apple does not always do so themselves. And in this case, when I say standard, since the HIG does not appear to address this issue, I mean what is the most common practice for available applications. []