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[glynor]

It's weird that the article really isn't any kind of a survey of alternatives.  More just a story of "itunes is sucking more and more, but you can sorta switch if you don't have an iphone".

+1

Very odd.  It is also interesting that they labeled MC a "PC-like" interface. To my mind, MC doesn't really feel completely "native" on either OS, frankly. I suppose it feels a bit more native on Windows still, but... I suspect that impression really amounts to two main things:
* the menu bar
* keyboard controls (which are typically much more consistent on OSX applications than they are on Windows)

It'd be nice to make some progress on those fronts. I think MC would leave less of a "bad taste" in some Mac users' mouths with those changes.

[blgentry]

It'd be nice to make some progress on those fronts. I think MC would leave less of a "bad taste" in some Mac users' mouths with those changes.

Agreed.  As I've said before, I didn't want to like MC, partially because it looked and felt so "un-OSX".  That obviously didn't stop me though!  But I'm not a typical Mac user.

* keyboard controls (which are typically much more consistent on OSX applications than they are on Windows)

What are you thinking of specifically?  Is this something that can be addressed by keyboard mappings?  I've done a handful of mappings that really improve my experience, some of which mimic the keyboard shortcuts in other apps.  Example:

<Command>-<up arrow> :  Volume Up
<Command>-<down arrow> :  Volume Down

The media keys (on my macbook pro keyboard) have always worked with MC, but I don't use them because they are located in a sort of hard to reach and inconvenient place.  Space bar for play/pause and my volume keys are way easier for me.

Brian.

[glynor]

Mostly. It would be nice if it used a few more of the common keyboard shortcut conventions worked out-of-the-box. Like ⌘-, to open Preferences, for example. The best would be if it defaulted to a more Mac-like keyboard shortcut layout, and provided a setting in Tools > Options > General or something where you could pick from a Mac-preset mapping, and the "traditional" Windows mapping (for switchers).

Perhaps all it takes is its own keyboard mapping "preset".  Not sure.

There are a few more behavioral things. Quitting the application when you close the main Window, for example (⌘-w).

But, honestly, I'd say the Menus are the biggest thing.

[Cedric D]

My wish list contains:

- native osx fonts
- native osx scrolling (right now it lags)
- drag & drop out of MC moves files instead of copying them

[Afrosheen]

Mostly. It would be nice if it used a few more of the common keyboard shortcut conventions worked out-of-the-box. Like ⌘-, to open Preferences, for example. The best would be if it defaulted to a more Mac-like keyboard shortcut layout, and provided a setting in Tools > Options > General or something where you could pick from a Mac-preset mapping, and the "traditional" Windows mapping (for switchers).

Perhaps all it takes is its own keyboard mapping "preset".  Not sure.

There are a few more behavioral things. Quitting the application when you close the main Window, for example (⌘-w).

But, honestly, I'd say the Menus are the biggest thing.

I thought you were the one who said that this will never happen because how the coding was done to make this a cross platform app to be run on any OS?  If the changes require a platform specific code then it's not going to happen.  This was with the Native Mac look thread when MC for Mac was initially released…

[glynor]

I thought you were the one who said that this will never happen because how the coding was done to make this a cross platform app to be run on any OS?  If the changes require a platform specific code then it's not going to happen.  This was with the Native Mac look thread when MC for Mac was initially released…

I never said that.

I probably said they'd never re-write MC to use native AppKit controls. That makes it harder to emulate native look and feel, because you have to write platform-specific code, but not impossible. MC already has plenty of platform-specific code. It has a ton of it in the Windows branch, of course, but there is also obviously platform specific code in both the OSX and Linux builds. Otherwise it wouldn't be able to play audio or display anything on the screen (much less, video).

In this case, I think some additional, modest "native-ication" is probably warranted to avoid bad first impressions like what lead to the quote in the article Jim linked originally (in the now-split thread). I thought it was perhaps useful, to give them some direction, if we could come up with a limited list of important first-impression-type "targets" to work on.

[glynor]

For me, if I could wave a magic wand, and change any two things about the look & feel of MC on Mac it would be (in this order):

1. Menus: The menus should be native, or look and work like they are native, including putting the proper options under the Application Menu.

This is the thing that makes MC feel the weirdest to me on my Macs. Otherwise, it fits in as well as many of my other "not quite native AppKit" applications do (which are many, including Office, Chrome, Firefox, and all Adobe applications). But, the menus stand out like a sore thumb.

2. Keyboard Shortcuts: It may just be a case of making the default keyboard mappings better for an out-of-the-box Mac install, but I think it is a little more than just that, as discussed above. In my everyday usage, ⌘-W is the most dis-congruous one, but I know these kinds of things stand out to many Mac users.

I also think both of those things can be done. I'm not sure about the work involved in #1, but I think it is important.

Are there other ideas?  If you were given a magic wand and and able to choose only two things (where they can't be huge sweeping changes like "re-write the whole UI to be X," but limited-scope, targeted changes) what would you choose?

[Afrosheen]

Ok my mistake.  I thought you were just pointing out the limitations of implementing such features.  JohnT had originally addressed the request for native menus/keyboard shortcuts when I made this request back on MC ver. 19.  But as he noted, there's a long list of requests. 

But I'm on board with the two requests you gave and if possible would wish if these two could be given higher priority than any visual/skinning requests.