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> That's the thing. Back when they did the studies (early 80s) there was just > click, double click and that's it. The magic key combos came waaaaaaay > later. Like > ten years later. I don't think contextual menus were added > until OS 9. I'm pretty sure shift-click and command-click were there pretty much from the start. > So when the studies were done it made sense. Now, though, it smacks a little > of slavish devotion. Xerox had three buttons: select, action, and menu. Sun had three buttons: select, extend-select, and menu, plus double-click for action. Apple had three "buttons": select, extend-select and append-select, plus double-click. Then they added option-click for a fifth button, so some objects that used "select" for their "action" operation could have a selection operation. But different applications did different things for command-click and option-click and sometimes even shift-click, because there were so many alternatives that a single "action" didn't cover. So finally in OS 8 they started trying to clean things up with contextual menus. Too little too late. So, no, it never made sense except through a very specialised viewpoint that said "this GUI needs to be easy to demonstrate". They used to say as much: that having multiple buttons confused people who had never used any kind of GUI before so they had to stop and explain how the multiple buttons worked. That could take several minutes with some people. A few minutes isn't a lot of time compared to how long you're going to be using the interface, so I never understood why that was such a big deal. Then I realised that it's an awfully long time to expect people walking by in a computer store to pay attention. As a marketing tool it makes sense.There's stuff above here
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