Comment by cyberax
15 hours ago
"Some holes"? That's an understatement.
There's no option to bring up a context menu with the keyboard. And there are no keyboard accelerators _AT_ _ALL_. Windows will underline the shortcut characters when you hold "alt".
The philosophy was that anything visible in a context menu should also be in the app-wide menu bar. Instead of bring up a context menu and click Copy, you would find the Copy menu item in the menu bar. Therefore such menu items can be assigned any keyboard shortcut by the user.
I quote from Apple https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...:
> Always make context menu items available in the main interface, too. […] In macOS, an app’s menu bar menus list all the app’s commands, including those in various context menus.
Therefore one can rightly conclude that there is no need for a key to bring up a context menu.
In this case it's not a context menu, it's just a menu. User experience is degraded, see GP's case. There is an expectation and a common paradigm which is intentionally ignored because the OS developers thought they knew better than the users.
This reminds me of frequent conversations with other developers when presented with a bug report. "That's not a bug, it's working as intended." The intention is wrong, then -- the bug is in the design, not the code, but it's still a bug.
> There's no option to bring up a context menu with the keyboard.
That used to be the case but has changed. Since at least macOS 15 the context menu key on typical keyboards is recognized and functions, and on other keyboards it can be opened with Ctrl+Return.
> Since at least macOS 15 the context menu key on typical keyboards is recognized and functions
Apple's adding it to its own keyboards as well, at least on the third-generation Magic Keyboard with number pad (between F13 and forward delete).