I love OS X. Really I do. I have dumped the only platform I have known for the past 15 years in favor of it. I think, overall, it is a beautiful top-notch operating system and I wouldn’t have spent $1500 on an iBook if I thought it wasn’t.
I love opening a terminal and having a UNIX commandline. I love that I can run Firefox and Microsoft Office on such a beautiful interface. Everything, including webpages, simply look better on OS X (as long as you’re not using IE 5.2, that is…). Plus you can’t beat running on a UNIX-based kernel for stability. OS X has far more advantages and disadvantages—but you already know that.
However, it’s inconsistency gets to me. I wouldn’t mind if things just worked different on my Mac. I expect that. But when things work differently than Windows and don’t work consistenly, I have a problem with it. That is when it starts to cut into how fast I can work, forcing my former anti-apple-self to rise up to condemn Apple afresh.
Home/End Keys
Of all the wonderful irritations I have noticed, my favorite is the inconsistent Home/End keys. Since I am often using plaintext editors (such as SubEthaEdit, BBEdit, TextEdit, etc.) for coding work, l love my home/end keys. They are a Godsend. It makes editing much quicker! But when there is no standard way of implementing Home/End, then using them begins to become confusing and irritating.
For instance, I’m writing this in TextEdit. If I hit “End” it takes me to the end of this document but doesn’t actually move my cursor there. That ranks up pretty high on the stupid list. If I want to go to the end of the document, then I probably want to type there, too. So in TextEdit, if I want to go to the end or beginning of a line, I have to hit Command-Arrow (the arrow which way I want to go). Okay, no sweat, I can handle that if that’s all I have to remember.
SubEthaEdit uses the same method as TextEdit (unfortunately) except that when you hit End it goes to the end of the exact line but doesn’t follow through to the actual end of the line like TextEdit. Another inconsistency even though they work much alike in every other respect. BBEdit works very similarly to TextEdit’s keybindings.
But then I go into Microsoft Word or Dreamweaver. Wanting to go to the end of a line, I remember that Apple uses this Command-Arrow way of navigating. But when I Command-Arrow, it jumps to the next word, not the end of the sentence. But if you hit “Home” or “End” it goes to the end of a line, like the method I’m used to in Windows. Argh!
But wait… there’s more!
The Mighty Close (or Quit?) Button
I knew when I bought my iBook that the close button is not a quit button. I researched that, and even though abhorred by the concept, I bit (or should I say bought) the bullet. Since I have been a Windows and Linux user and am very used to the way they manage windows, when I click on the “X” and it is the last window of that application, I want it to quit. I don’t want it to stay running without any windows open. I want it gone.
Nope, not on this shiny OS. You have to hit Command-Q to really quit. Or go to App -> Quit. But this disturbing behavior isn’t my main point. I would be okay if this was consistent. For virtually any program the close button just closes the window but leaves the application running, but not always…
When I go to System Preferences, the close button decides to work as a quit button. So does iPhoto—but not iTunes. Calculator and DVD Player quits—but not Font Book. So you never know what will actually quit or what will stay running when you hit the close button. That’s simply poor design and inconsistent. Plus it gives me headaches.
But wait… there’s more!
PgUp/PgDn
Since I’m a web designer, I’m often SSHing (can I use that as a verb?) into servers and making changes. I use PuTTY in Windows (which is a fantastic client that even has mouse support) and it has served me well. Since OS X has a nice (I use that term loosely) terminal built in, I figured that doing SSH logins would be perfect. I was, as usual, dreaming.
Throw your keybindings out the window with Terminal. PgUp, PgDn, Home, or End won’t work correctly in Terminal. They have PgUp/PgDn set to move the buffer up and down. What?! I tried for hours to fix it to no avail. You have to hit Ctrl+PgDn or something to actually make it send a PgDn. Same with home or end.
So I downloaded iTerm, and I must say it works much better. It even has tabs built-in!
If you hit PgDn in Microsoft Word, it moves your cursor a page down for you. That makes sense. In TextEdit, it moves the page down but doesn’t move your cursor. So if you want to begin typing on that page, you have to do a mouse click otherwise TextEdit will bring you back to where you started your PgUp/PgDn adventure. BBEdit (again, unfortunately) works the same as TextEdit.
Dreamweaver (in “code” mode) works much like Microsoft Word in respect to the Home/End keys, but works like TextEdit with PgUp/PgDn. When you hit PgDn, it doesn’t move your cursor with you. But in “design” mode it moves the cursor for you!
This has to be the reason why Mac people are often portrayed as insane—things like this drive them mad, I am sure of it. I’m nearly there myself.
Conclusion
It is strange that Windows is more consistent than OS X in this regard. I never had a problem with this in Windows—Home always went to the beginning of a line, End to the end, PgDn went to the next page and moved the cursor there, and PgUp likewise but reverse. I would think that something like this would be consistent in OS X as well, if not (somehow) work more consistent! There can always be exceptions if a certain program must work differently, but this does not seem to be the case with the above examples. It is simply bad design. With OS X, it seems to be a rule that keybindings be different in each program instead of an exception—which does not go along with Apple’s user-friendly reputation.
