{"id":42345,"date":"2024-03-05T15:41:41","date_gmt":"2024-03-05T20:41:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=42345"},"modified":"2024-03-21T11:57:42","modified_gmt":"2024-03-21T15:57:42","slug":"keyboard-control-of-messages-app","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2024\/03\/05\/keyboard-control-of-messages-app\/","title":{"rendered":"Keyboard Control of Messages.app"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>With macOS Catalina, Apple replaced the Messages app, which had been based on iChat, with a version derived from the iOS Messages app. This brought some new features such as effects but dropped others such as conversation archiving. (You can&rsquo;t even Select All to copy the text of a conversation.) Messages is often held up as a successful use Catalyst, but under macOS Sonoma the keyboard shortcuts still don&rsquo;t work properly. The Page Up, Page Down, and Home\/End keys don&rsquo;t do anything in either the conversions list or the messages list. Nor does tabbing between the different panes work. With the text field active, pressing Tab actually inserts a tab character, and holding down a modifier doesn&rsquo;t help. Granted, being able to transfer keyboard focus isn&rsquo;t very useful because there isn&rsquo;t much you can do with it: scrolling messages with the arrow keys is broken, and you can&rsquo;t use the arrow keys to select a conversation. Oddly, Messages uses Control-Tab to do that.<\/p>\n\n<p>Previously:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2019\/06\/14\/desktop-apps-post-catalyst\/\">Desktop Apps Post-Catalyst<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n<p id=\"keyboard-control-of-messages-app-update-2024-03-21\">Update (2024-03-21): <a href=\"https:\/\/wadetregaskis.com\/a-hint-that-the-mac-messages-app-is-not-native\/\">Wade Tregaskis<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/wadetregaskis.com\/a-hint-that-the-mac-messages-app-is-not-native\/\">\n<p>Even so, there are things which just scream &ldquo;I&rsquo;m actually an iOS app&rdquo;, like when you right-click a message or attachment while the Messages window is on a secondary display, and the contextual menu appears in the top-left corner of the main display. And disappears when you click on any item in it, without activating the item. Because it&rsquo;s reacting to the mouse location as if it were in the correct place on the secondary display. But if you click on the secondary display, it just dismisses the pop-up menu without activating the selected item &#x2013; I don&rsquo;t know how they managed to get that discontinuity between mouse move events and mouse down events, but there you go, the miracle that is Catalyst.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>With macOS Catalina, Apple replaced the Messages app, which had been based on iChat, with a version derived from the iOS Messages app. This brought some new features such as effects but dropped others such as conversation archiving. (You can&rsquo;t even Select All to copy the text of a conversation.) Messages is often held up [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2024-03-05T20:41:43Z","apple_news_api_id":"c6c6891f-77a9-4508-a277-50318c4d7543","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2024-03-21T15:57:45Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAQ==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/AxsaJH3epRQiid1AxjE11Qw","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[125,30,1666,2385,141],"class_list":["post-42345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-keyboardshortcuts","tag-mac","tag-macos-10-15","tag-macos-14-sonoma","tag-messages"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42345"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42345\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42586,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42345\/revisions\/42586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}