Allan Odgaard wrote:

No, 1-9 “breaks” exactly to promote the “type to select” (which  
has always worked, and we even do special tricks e.g. in the  
Subversion bundle to have D choose the most likely Diff action etc.).

Wow. I can't imagine what Apple is thinking. It works great if your pop-up menus are all unique within the first few letters, but usually they're not. I assume that a "pop-up" includes things like the right-click (control-click if you're using a button-challenged mouse) context menu. Pick a common app, like Safari. Right-click an image. There are 14 menu items, with names such as "Open Image In New Window" and "Open Image In New File". You have to type 15 characters to get to the first unique one! And heaven help you if you make a typo or pause for a second.

In fact, I can't think of a single instance in which this could save keystrokes and make menu selection faster. TextMate included. I find the new command-# scheme awful considering how much finger-gymnastics we already have to go through to enter a keyboard command. I mean, I have to type ctrl-shift-option-{whatever} to open the menu, then switch to a different modifer to actually select something? Madness.

If Apple's going to enforce this I guess there's not much you can do. The command-# scheme is as good as you're going to get. But overall this change is just going to lead to developers giving us menus that are artificially unique in the first few characters, such as "1-Do This", "2-Do That", "3-Do the other". I don't think this is really what Apple is shooting for.

All change is hard, so give it a few days, but after that, do let me  
know if it is more bother to use the modifiers.

I'll be able to live with the new way, but I can't imagine that there's any chance I'll ever come to prefer it. Any way you slice it it's just more keystrokes.

--

Steve King
Sr. Software Engineer
Arbor Networks
+1 734 821 1461
www.arbornetworks.com