John Gruber on macOS Inconsistencies
Gruber’s piece is ostensibly about some macOS shortcuts involving the command key, but this bit about the growing number inconsistencies in macOS resonated with me:
And to top this all off — truly, this is genuinely hard to believe — these ⌘R and ⌘L shortcuts not only break 27-year-old Finder shortcuts, but they aren’t even consistent with Photos, which uses ⌘R for “Rotate Counterclockwise” and ⌥⌘R for “Rotate Clockwise”. So in Photos the R maps to Rotate not Right, and the direction for an image rotated using ⌘R is left/counterclockwise.
His frustration is understandable. The people working on macOS today seem to genuinely not understand the platform, or at least are indifferent to it. Which I find incredibly bizarre since presumably their jobs necessitate using macOS all day, every day. How can you spend that much time sitting in front of the platform and not understanding it?
Back to the original point of Gruber’s piece about the command key, he does have some great tips, some of which are new to me:
Using the Command key as a modifier to reveal items in the Finder while clicking has a long and consistent history on the Mac. You can also Command-click items in the Dock to reveal them rather than open them. (If you Command-Option-click a folder in the Dock it will open that folder, rather than reveal that folder in its parent folder.) Also useful: you can click on a folder in the Dock (Downloads is one I use this with frequently) and then Command-click on one of the items in the menu listing the folder’s contents. And in document-based apps, you can Command-click on the document’s proxy icon in the window’s title bar and you’ll get a pop-up menu showing the folder hierarchy of the document’s location in the file system. Select any of those folders and you’ll go to that folder in the Finder.