Actually, it’s paved with good intentions, and that’s certainly what Panic had in mind when they added the CTRL+Q shortcut to the lastest version of Coda (OS X). What’s it for? Open Quickly. I don’t even know where to start ranting, but come on, this must be one for the books. After years of chiding Windows for having Shut Down hidden behind Start, you’d think an outfit like Panic (“Shockingly Good Mac Software”) would be clever enough not to go and do that.
Since CMD + Q closes apps, using CTRL + Q for opening things is A Bad Idea, period. It’s also hilarious. I sure would like to hear their rationale for this.
For clarity; I haven’t tried Coda myself. Many people swear by it. I’m sure it’s nice and I will give it a go sometime. I remain ever sceptical though, it seems nothing can one up my all time favorite companion, now defunct, HomeSite.
Tags: Shortcuts
November 12, 2008 at 20:25
Hey Jonas!
I’m equally concerned about Control-Q, and fretted about it a lot. In actual usage, I’ve found that my brain kept them pretty distinct — and, of course, chance of losing data is zero since you’d get a confirmation sheet — but it’s something I’m keeping a close eye on and we’ll tweak if we get a lot of reports of accidental quit.
Our rationale: that we wanted something easily accessible with one hand — preferably the left hand — to quickly trigger the window.
Throughout the beta cycle, we tried the following shortcuts:
1. Command-Escape — discovered that most systems use that for FrontRow.
2. Control-Escape — that worked great for half of the users, but the other half filed bugs that it didn’t work. Turns out if you have “Screen Sharing” enabled, it silently intercepts this shortcut, even if you’re not sharing a screen. We filed a bug with Apple.
3. Command-Option-` (backtick) — felt good and worked well! But, surprise! It turns out a lot of international users don’t actually have a backtick key.
4. Command-! — easy to explain, but the system would remove it from our menu silently without telling us so it wouldn’t work. We were totally stumped, until we discovered it’s secretly reserved for eject floppy disk… even in the year 2008.
Suffice it to say, the decision to use Control-Q wasn’t taken lightly.
Best,
Cabel
November 12, 2008 at 20:49
Cabel – Wow, now I feel bad for ranting. Thanks for shedding some light on the process!
I understand it must be difficult for software developers to find good shortcuts – there are only so many keys… Still, there may be better alternatives, and I’m probably not the only one you’ll catch flak from over it :).
Now I’m off to try and find a floppy drive for my mac so that can experience the awesomeness of “command + !”.