> Can you give a reason why Enter to open a file is ideal

Because "Enter" has been used a key to activate/open the currently selected item in various UIs across various platforms for several decades now?

Also, possibly, because the button is labeled "Enter"? I guess on Macs it's "Return" though, but that doesn't really make any more sense.

Really, it doesn't make sense to you that enter would correspond to the most common, least destructive action?

Alt-F4 makes little sense, true, but in almost all windows apps control-q or control-w does exactly the same thing as on osx.

Also, having sane defaults for keys people are likely to press is much more important than /not/ having obscure keyboard shortcuts that users never have to know even exist.

I want to say ctrl+q is an exit command from within the application (graceful shutdown) whereas alt+f4 is more of a system level halt for whatever is in focus (hard reset).

That's not actually true. Alt+F4 is exactly the same as clicking the Close window button, and sends WM_CLOSE to the app, which can then handle it gracefully (or not) as it chooses.

In particular, if you have unsaved data, most apps will prompt to save on Alt+F4.

Did not know that, so if an app is non responsive but alt+f4 does the trick, does that mean the app maybe wasn't as FUBAR as I thought?

When Windows sends WM_CLOSE for any reason, it will wait for some time for the app to react (not necessarily close itself, just process the message). But if it does not react soon enough, Windows will mark the app as hanging, and you'll get that standard wait-or-close dialog.

However, Alt+F4 translating to WM_CLOSE is also handled by the app message loop - i.e. Windows sends WM_KEYDOWN events for those keys, and when they get to the event loop, it's supposed to call TranslateMessage. That one normally handles WM_KEYDOWN -> WM_CHAR translation, but it will also handle any shortcuts, and this includes Alt+F4. So if the app is hanging, messages aren't pumped, and the shortcut doesn't work. To send WM_CLOSE, you'd need to use the close button on the window.

So if the app does close on Alt+F4, it was, at the minimum, pumping messages and invoking TranslateMessage on them.

Thanks for the detailed reply! I learned something today.

Yes. If you want to kill an app in Windows, use Task Manager or powershell.

Well aware of that alternative :P I had a display glitch with a game client where it would take the whole screen but not really display anything, leaving me with sound and a working computer but no display even after alt+tab or even ctrl+alt+del. I basically had to blind type win+r > "cmd" > taskkill /f /im Gw2-64bit.exe whenever it happened :(

> the most common, least destructive action?

Launching processes with a single keypress and no confirmation can hardly be called "the least destructive action."

Why Cmd+Q and not Cmd+Esc then? It is frustrating to press Cmd+Q by accident when you intend to press Cmd+W, at least there is a physical separation between F4 and F5, so you can't get it wrong.

I still haven't figured out how to actually open a file/folder in Finder (with the keyboard).

There is even a shell command called "open" that opens its argument with the application Finder would use, or watever you pass as an option.

(As a sidenote, you can drag documents from the finder into a Terminal window and their absolute paths appear at the cursor position).

I hear it's Command-O.

Oh! Thanks. ⌘↓ works as well (and ⌘↑ to navigate to parent directory).

Yup. Finder's still not the greatest for keyboard navigation, to be sure, but these shortcuts do make it more comfortable to use.

Don't worry I don't use "Enter opening something" as my only criteria to judge the discoverability and the ease of use of an interface -- and like you said Windows is full of arbitrary and/or curious keyboard choices -- but pretty much like all interfaces. (However, I still find enter => renaming really weird :p )

As for Cmd+Q and Cmd+W, those might be somewhat more intuitive, but only for some languages, and arguably only very vaguely intuitive for Cmd+W even for english speaking people.

But then again, I don't think there is a real notable difference in the end between most modern systems. It's more of a question of what we are used to.

Enter is just a huge fucking key on some keyboards and easy to get in your way. It just feels super unintuituve to map rename on there. I dont ever use enter for starting ether so its not really about that

> Can you give a reason why Enter to open a file is ideal

Lol. 10/10 troll.