I may well be doing something very dim, but I can’t get shortcut keys for text alignment to work (right, center or justify). It’s fine if I do it manually from the Text menu.
I’ve tried by positioning the cursor at the start of a line, at the end of a line, and by highlighting the text to be aligned.
Interestingly (or perhaps not!) when I use the shortcut to center text, I see the ‘Edit’ menu flash as active for a second.
It is working fine for me. Are you holding down shift for all of them? I am pressing Cmd-Shift-\ for center, which is really Cmd-|, and so forth for the curly brackets with left and right alignment. By the way Cmd-\ (without the shift) will toggle spelling as you type, which would cause the Edit menu to blink.
I take your point that it’s implied but in my case, I’m still fumbling my way about and took it literally. This is probably worse for people like me who are getting used to using a Mac for the first time and see the command key as some magical thing! My brain never even registered that the bracket is a shifted character once I saw the command key icon.
I’m no expert but, to my knowledge, other Mac apps use icons to indicate command and shift keys?
True. But I still think it would be better to include the shift key in commands when needed. When I think commands I’m not really thinking the way I would when typing a character, even though, as you point out, it is implied in the command. Just MHO.
What I mean is, I am pretty sure this is standard Apple behaviour. I don’t think Keith has any control over it. It does show the shift key symbol for letters, because it only uses capital letters to display letter keys, for clarity. When it comes to symbols, I’ve never seen the shift key used. It shows “Cmd-&” instead of “Cmd-Shift-7” and so on. I could be wrong because I don’t really know what I’m talking about. Just what I’ve seen.
Ah. I see. And I don’t believe for a minute that you don’t know what you are talking about. You are right about it seeming to be standard Apple behavior. I just checked out a few programs myself and it’s the same in all of them. I don’t use keyboard shortcuts all that much, save for simple or really repetitive things, so I never really noticed. I guess what would confuse me is that there are times when the shift symbol is included in other commands, so I’d expect to see it here. But where it’s included is with key strokes that don’t already involve the shift key, like command-shift-c, etc. So I get your point about it being implied with symbols, etc. Makes sense, actually. Except to those of us thick enough to not get it at first.
Sorry, what Ioa’s saying is that it’s not something the developer can do–when you type that key combination, the OS displays it that way. But at least since you know about the sneaky “shift” in shortcuts, you can remember to try it if your first attempt doesn’t work.