One thing I could never understand about my Mac is why I couldn’t use the keyboard to switch to combo boxes in forms on the web. For example, when I buy something online, I generally need to enter my shipping address. First, I type in my name, street address, and city. I press the Tab key to switch between each field. Next, I need to enter my state, so I press Tab…. Oops! It went straight to ZIP code and skipped the State field. What the hell?
Coming from a Windows world, I’m used to keyboard tabbing that goes between every field in a webpage or application window. It turns out that Mac users do what they do best (think differently) in regards to this user interaction. By default, keyboard tabbing only moves between “text boxes and lists only”. How strange.
As I happily discovered today, there is a setting hidden deep in the System Preferences that allows you to change this behavior. Here’s what you need to do:
-
Open up System Preferences.
-
Choose Keyboard & Mouse under the Hardware group.
-
Go to the Keyboard Shortcuts page.
-
At the very bottom where it says “Full Keyboard Access” change the radio button from “Text boxes and lists only” to All controls.
Thankfully, that’s one of the last things about my Mac that I still had to work around. Now if only I didn’t have to work around all sorts of new things when I need to go back to Windows! I hope this post helps someone else who finds it strange that tabbing is so limited by default on Mac OS X.