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i've always lamented the incompleteness of mac keyboard shortcuts compared to windows, but it's been a long time since i've used windows, so it's hard for me to remember specifics. but i do remember that multi-key shortcuts generally made more sense in windows. and you could alt-tab easily between windows of different applications, not just applications or just tabs/windows of the same application.


Although I too have lost my muscle memory, not having used Windows as my primary O/S in a while, one thing I miss is the ability to traverse through menus with a series of keystrokes; e.g., Alt-F, then p to print, as opposed to Ctrl-P. This came in handy for menu items with an obscure shortcut, or no shortcut at all.

Similarly, I would preface some programs in the Start menu with a unique number; e.g., Win, P, 1 opened File Explorer; Win, P, 2 opened the Command Prompt, etc. With the Windows 10 start menu, I just start typing, but it sometimes exhibits weird behavior, where it finds what I want after one or two characters, then changes to the wrong thing after I type another (correct) character.

I generally prefer the Cmd-Tab / Cmd-Tilde split on macOS to the Alt-Tab on Windows. However, after all these years, I still can't always predict which window is next--will I go back to the window I was just on, or keep going forward to another one?


You can access the menu by keyboard with Ctrl-F2, but it isn't exactly what you want; that said, a nifty property of macOS is that you can modify the keyboard shortcuts if any app--including adding shortcuts for things that don't have one--in the Keyboard Shortcuts settings panel under App Shortcuts (it works by doing a string match on the menu item name).




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