Vista’s built in search box on the start menu is a boon for launching applications. The general accessibility of windows applications to users of the keyboard is a huge boon to those of us who try to keep our grubby little fingers on the keyboard.
This does not seem to be quite the case on the mac. I’m probably unaware of all the keyboard accelerators that are available – after all, I’ve been using Windows for a lot longer. A lot of my use of the keyboard was prompted by a long use of FVWM while in Sun, where practically everything was usable without having to stray to the mouse. Mind you on laptops, the location of the touchpad is a lot better in this regard – you just drag your claw-like thumb over the tracking surface.
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OS X has a TON of great keyboard shortcuts. Spotlight makes for an excellent application launcher and search in one.
My most used are certainly Commad-W to close windows, Command-Q to quit an application, cut & paste keys and the menu common items.
Another cute thing you can do is type “special” characters with the Option key… such as, I don’t know, é ü and ÷. Hold option and “e” to get into “accent mode”. Next key will type some kind of accented character. Option-U goes into “umlaut mode” and so on. Not every key sets up a “mode” though, some just print a single character.
Interesting though that I find X11 has my favourite mouse behaviors and super customizable keyboards, but OS X does have a more rounded, friendly and arguably more powerful GUI experience than any other Unix, Linux or Windows environment I’ved used.
Anyways, I’m ranting. Nice little blog you got here.