Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Panther Edition

Keyboard & Mouse

This panel lets you do some frivolous fine-tuning of your mouse, keyboard, and (for laptops) trackpad. It also unlocks Mac OS X’s strange and remarkable Full Keyboard Access feature, which lets you control your Mac’s menus, windows, dialog boxes, buttons, the Dock, and the toolbar—all from the keyboard. Here’s a tour of the Keyboard & Mouse panel’s various tab buttons.

UP TO SPEED Bringing Dead Keys to Life

If you press Option while the Key Caps window is open, you see little white outlines around certain keys (shown in Figure 8-10, for example). These rectangles identify the Mac’s five dead keys—keys that, when pressed once, type nothing onscreen.

However, when you then type another key—a normal letter, for example—it appears with the dead key’s displayed marking over it.

To type the ñ in jalapeño, for example, you must first press Option-N and then type an n. This same two-step approach lets you type characters like ö and é.

Keyboard Tab

The changes you make are teeny tiny, but can have a cumulatively big impact on your daily typing routine.

• Key Repeat Rate, Delay Until Repeat. You’re probably too young to remember the antique once known as the typewriter. On some electric versions of this machine, you could hold down the letter X key to type a series of XXXXXXXs—ideal for crossing something out in a contract, for example.

  On the Mac, every key behaves this way. Hold down any key long enough, and it starts spitting out repetitions, making it easy to type, for example, ...