How to Select from Dropdown Menus with Keyboard?

Oh, I ALWAYS wanted to know that. But yeah, your picture is not right. I knew how to do what Barney-15E said but thats not what I wanna know. I want to know how to select items from a dropdown menu using arrow keys. Thats something I used to do on Photoshop for PC that I never managed to do on a mac. Hard to admit that thou 🙂

Sort of Barney. You use enter to activate highlights and space to activate outlined items no?

I think your semantics are probably correct. However, I think of the outline as a "highlight" and the filled button as "default" or filled.

cassiofm wrote:

Oh, I ALWAYS wanted to know that. But yeah, your picture is not right. I knew how to do what Barney-15E said but thats not what I wanna know. I want to know how to select items from a dropdown menu using arrow keys. Thats something I used to do on Photoshop for PC that I never managed to do on a mac. Hard to admit that thou 🙂

Once you are in the dropdown menu, the arrow keys should move you around in the menu, so I'm not sure what it is you can't do.

I just discovered somethings...

One problem that I had with dropdown menus was in Photoshop for Mac and it was the Layer Blend Mode. On PC is like you said: select it then use arrow keys. But not on a Mac! Here its shift+/shift- to cycle thru these options. This saves a lot of time when trying new effects and its great not having to click and select each one of the drop down menu options. But whenever you clic on the drop down menu it will never give you the option of using arrow keys, you either click on an item with the mouse or use the shortcuts...

The other problem I always had was with Pages. I still have it by the way. Whenever I try to experiment with different fonts on a word I have to highlight the word, click on the Fonts drop down menu and select the font. If I want to try a new one I have to do it all again. There is no way I can click on the drop down and then use the arrow keys. And you know what's funny? You CAN do this on Photoshop! If you try to use text on Photoshop and want to experiment fonts you CAN click on the fonts drop down menu and use arrow keys.

Adobe probably rolls its own menuing system, as they do with every other part of their ugly, annoying UI.

The Font panel doesn't respond to arrow keys, and since it is a panel, the arrow keys get sent to the document. A panel floats above the working documents allowing you to continue working on the document in the background. The Font panel appears to only respond to mouse clicks.

Yeah, I hate that. It's ridiculous. If I'm working on, let's say, a logo and I wanna try different fonts I need to click in each font. Which would ultimately make try that on a different app (maybe Word) that allows me to run thru the fonts just by holding an arrow key

In the font panel, if you first click on the panel's title bar to give the window focus, you can then navigate within each column with the arrow keys and navigate between columns by pressing tab.

You can tell the panel has proper focus when its close & max buttons turn red & green respectively. Also the current column or field will have a highlight around it.

Yes!! It worked! Thanks Seph!! Now why isn't it easier and more obvious like on bloody Microsoft Word? I just love Apple but some details like this are really annoying.

But thanks, that solved a big mystery for me 😀

Now since I'm getting such a fast and quality feedback, let me ask something completely disconnected to this topic but that's been annoying me equally: is there a way to extract a specific file from inside a RAR or ZIP and send it to a specific folder without unzipping/rar all other files? All RAR/ZIP extractors I tried just extract everything from inside a compacted file and the most I could get of a destination folder was a new folder with the name of the file. 😕

In Terminal:

unzip zipfile.zip [comma separated list of filenames to extract] -d path/to/destination

If you need to see what is in it:

unzip -l zipfile.zip

Thanks. I found a terminal code before, but no app that does that. A friend of mine new to mac keeps pestering me about that, that WinRAR does that and now I want to find an app that does the same

😀

zipeg or pacifist will let you drag/drop from zipped archives; zipeg should do the same with rar files.

Great! Zipeg is really good! Thank you Andy!!