Re: Terminal.app

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From: peter (Peter da Silva)
Subject: Re: Terminal.app
Date: 21:47 on 13 Aug 2003
> Give me back my Page Up/Page Down keys!

And the rest.

Mac OS X rant #0:

If you want to have a utility that'll do something with a selected object,
you can put it in the services menu, you can put it in the contextual
menu, you can put it in the script menu, you can map a function key to it,
you can make a control-click dock applet to grab it, you can drop it into
a dock applet, you can drop it into a window, you can drop it into a menu
applet, you can drop it on an icon on the desktop, or you can have your
own menu.

All of these things have their own unique API. Some of these things are
just side effects of other things you can do, but at the very least they
should be able to bring together the services menu, the contextual menu,
and key bindings.

Honestly.

The services menu is straight from NeXTStep. It's got no business being in
here except it was in there. It should have just been another context menu
line right from the start, and services that aren't available should just
not be shown.

Then, the context menu is fundamentally a shortcut. There shouldn't be
anything there that isn't available from the regular menus. Particularly,
an application shouldn't have options for its own objects that only exist
in the context menu.

And then there's the key bindings. GOD they're a mess.

No, there needs to be a single central "input manager" preference pane that
shows you what keys are mapped to what actions in every damn installed app,
and you should be able to change any of them. Same with contextual menus:
if I want to have "save selected text as" in a context menu in Terminal
then let me. Or disable "CMD-W" for Terminal because I keep closing windows
when I hit CMD-W instead of CTL-W...

Personally, I like the way Terminal does pgup/pgdn. But I don't even like
using arrow keys in a terminal session. :)

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