Missing shortcut hints

16.11.2025 0

Until this day, I do not understand why there’s no shortcut indicator/hint in the macOS System Settings search bar placeholder. I use the search all the time since I can’t find a thing in the mess of macOS’s system settings¹. Many macOS apps use the cmd+l² shortcut to activate the search. macOS itself uses cmd+f. This is the typical Find shortcut, to activate the search in the System Settings app and other apps, such as the Finder. While this might be obvious, there could also be an indicator right besides the search placeholder, such as Search (cmd+f).

The search input field on QMK docs. The `cmd+k` shortcut is quite common for static content search frameworks (e.g. fuse.js)

Add shortcut hints to improve user experience

When you’re visually impaired, you hopefully get (at least with Apple software products) some accessibility information about an input field.

A screenshot of the Accessibility Inspector showing information regarding the system settings search field.

If you look at the screenshot, you can see that the input field is marked as a `Search Field` which distinguishes it from other input fields. This is information that is provided to people that use VoiceOver or other accessibility features. And this is great. I just wonder why there's no shortcut information. This would be a visual indicator and accessibility helper for non-visually impaired people thus making using apps faster with a better experience.

Somehow this is a thing on every OS. ↩︎
cmd is the GUI key for macOS (such as win on windows). ↩︎