⌘` is reserved for the last 20 years.

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Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
18/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
macos
Domain
content

Research direction

No repository file, test, or entry point is mentioned. Start by reviewing the linked Apple Human Interface Guidelines and the blog post under discussion; clarify which post or shortcut behavior should change, then record the maintainer-approved outcome.

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Description

Hi,

(Sorry for posting here. I don't know what is your current preferred form of feedback on your blog posts.)

Since the introduction of Mac OS X in 2000 the keyboard shortcut ⌘` was reserved by the system, to cycle between the open windows of the current application. It is so stated in the current Human Interface Guidelines and looking back on my archive of HIGs also in earlier guidelines. The earliest PDF I have is from 2005 but in my memory the convention is far older.

And it's also a big user expectation: If an app runs on MacOS I expect it to behave in this way, because my fingers memorized and trained with this shortcut for the last 20 years across hundreds of apps.

And there is another argument to be made here: I'm using a german keyboard layout. As a result I'm using ⌘< as a shortcut. The place of the ` key on the US layout is taken by the < key on the german layout. The ` key is far on the top right instead of the convenient place on the bottom left. In my experience the best practice for internationalisation of keyboard shortcuts is to stick to safe combinations of ⌘ + [a-zA-Z0-9].

Anyway. Sorry for your problem, but maybe that is an explanation why you'll find ⌘` suddenly taken anywhere: it always was. 🙃

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