> Apple Mail treats cmd+r as reply; acting as an alias for 'get mail' would make a lot more sense as it's analogous to refresh.
However, Apple's poor shortcut choices are made much less egregious by a built-in way of (re)defining custom shortcuts (under System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts); Windows does not natively offer such an option, I think.
OK, I must admit I hadn't fully appreciated the customisability before. App Shortcuts look pretty good, and I can, effectively, get the exact behaviour I want out of Mail. However, the method of assigning a shortcut must be one of the worst pieces of usability I've ever experienced from Apple. From [1]:
"Type the menu command for which you want to set a keyboard shortcut in the Menu Title field.
You must type the command exactly as it appears in the Application menu, including ellipses and any other punctuation. An ellipsis is a special character that looks like three periods. To type an ellipsis, press Option-semicolon, or use the Character Viewer. It may be difficult to know whether the command is written in the menu with a real ellipsis or with three periods, so if one does not work, try the other."
I agree that the instructions are pretty terrible! What might be a better way to do it? The best that I can think of is something like: "Click here to start recording, and click here to choose a running application. The first menu item on which you click will be chosen as the target."
(In fact, I seem to remember some sort of 'macro recorder' from back in the Tiger days that worked on the level of literal mouse motion (and was fully as fragile as it sounded, since it obviously relied heavily on the exact position of things on screen). Does anyone else remember something like that?)
I don't know about the inner workings of Mac applications, but isn't there a resources file that exposes menu items? Seems like this could be accessed via some kind of API.
> I don't know about the inner workings of Mac applications, but isn't there a resources file that exposes menu items?
I guess so, if one knows how to read NIB files (which I'm sure any OS X programmer does, but I don't):
$ cd /Applications/Safari.app; grep -r 'Show Top Sites' *
Binary file Contents/Resources/English.lproj/ToolbarItems.nib matches
> Seems like this could be accessed via some kind of API.
Sure, and there's no need even for it to be a public API, since it's Apple software that sets the shortcut. My question wasn't how the program should handle it, but what would be the best way to present the choice to a (non-programmer) user.
However, Apple's poor shortcut choices are made much less egregious by a built-in way of (re)defining custom shortcuts (under System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts); Windows does not natively offer such an option, I think.