On Monday, Sep 23, 2002, at 12:01 US/Pacific, David W. Fenton wrote:

>>> Why would anyone *not* normally use pageup/pagedown to navigate 
>>> within a text box? Hello?

>> Because that's not the convention on Macintosh. It's more efficient 
>> to use the Option-Arrow key combos.

> It's more efficient to press two keys instead of one?

The problem with this question is it's distinct lack of scope. 
Obviously, if the only thing you want to do is scroll a page and have 
the cursor follow then pressing one key will do. The efficiency becomes 
apparent when one has to do more than scroll--as when actually editing 
a document. The navigation and selection work is all done in the arrow 
area: there is no necessity to jump back and forth between the page 
keys area and the arrows area to attain the functionality.

One thing that occurs to me is that you might not be familiar with 
Macintosh keyboards and the use of the Command key in Macintosh 
applications. It is our main modifier key. In this respect, Windows 
users suffer because they don't have the advantage of the extra 
modifier key and of course M$ keyboard combinations are limited 
compared to the Mac.

I refer once again to the PDF documentation for Text Editor available 
on my site. The navigation and selection key combinations are in a 
table and you can scan them quickly to get an idea of what us Mac users 
are familiar with.

Another thing is that there are several Mac keyboards that don't have 
the page keys. Most notably on some PowerBooks and the "Standard" 
keyboards from the ADB era (which also didn't have function keys). It 
is essential that Mac applications support the arrow key shortcuts but 
they can optionally support the Windows type combos.


Philip Aker
http://www.aker.ca


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