Mac OS X 10.6.0 (Snow Leopard): One more thing about ‘Cycle Through Windows’ shortcut

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
September 3rd, 2009 • 10:35 am

I have just made the transition to Snow Leopard on my main “production” Mac Pro. It’s been a fairly smooth process so far, and I now have one more thing to add about the issue with the “Cycle Through Windows” keyboard shortcut discussed earlier.

It turns out that, on my main machine, where I installed Snow Leopard on top of my existing Leopard system, the keyboard shortcut for the “Move focus to next window in application” command (which is the name for the “Cycle Through Windows” command in System Preferences’ “Keyboard Shortcuts” pane) is already the correct one for my Canadian CSA keyboard, i.e. command-Ù. I didn’t not have to change it from command-` back to command-Ù after installing Snow Leopard.

Yet, on my other Mac Pro, where I did a clean install of Snow Leopard on a machine with a Canadian CSA keyboard connected to it from the get-go, the default keyboard shortcut for the “Move focus to next window in application” command was command-`, and I had to change it manually to command-Ù.

This suggests that the history of this particular keyboard shortcut might be even more complicated. I don’t know—and I don’t have time to verify—whether doing a clean install of Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) on a machine with a Canadian CSA keyboard connected to it would result in a system with the command-` instead of command-Ù for “Cycle Through Windows.” If so, then it would indicate that the problem is not new in Snow Leopard. Otherwise, it is indeed a new bug—albeit a very minor one, obviously, since the shortcut can easily be changed back to the appropriate one.

On a side note, Betalogue reader Steve Nygard reports that, in a message on the xcode-users mailing list, an Apple employee confirms that the behaviour of the command-` shortcut itself has changed in Xcode. It used to be that the shortcut, in Xcode, would cycle through text editor windows. It now seems to cycle through all project windows, not just text editor windows. Some Xcode users are not too pleased with that, but the Apple employee indicates that it enforces consistency across all Cocoa applications. So there were indeed changes made to the “Cycle Through Windows” command in some contexts in Snow Leopard, and that might indirectly explain the problem encountered by Canadian CSA keyboard users.


3 Responses to “Mac OS X 10.6.0 (Snow Leopard): One more thing about ‘Cycle Through Windows’ shortcut”

  1. Betalogue » Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard): Clicking on foreground window breaks ‘Cycle Through Windows’ order says:

    […] changes or breaks something in that feature. (See for example when happened when I tried to use the usual keyboard shortcut on my Canadian CSA keyboard in Snow […]

  2. Betalogue » Safari 5.1: Cycle Through Windows is broken says:

    […] to the “Cycle Through Windows” shortcut in Snow Leopard, which I wrote about here, here, and here. Or Pages’s idiotic keyboard shortcuts for adding rows and columns in tables, which interfere […]

  3. Betalogue » Mail 5.0: ‘Next Alternative’ shortcut with Canadian CSA keyboard says:

    […] the keys involved in the shortcuts are located in a different place on their keyboards. There was a problem with the shortcut for the “Cycle Through Windows” command in Snow Leopard. There was another one with the […]