In summary, I am switching my daily activities from an original TouchBar MBP running Sierra to a MBAir on Sequoia 15.2 with a German Keyboard.
I’ve learned some new Keyboard Shortcuts for various interactions but a common one on Sierra I used many times a day is known in Sierra Finder as Window > Cycle Through Windows or Command - (grave accent: `) (or left thumb - little finger ;-)
I also used it a lot in Mail and perhaps other Apps but when I looked in Sierra Mail’s menues there was no such command, yet it worked.
To use Command - `on the German keyboard involves more finger gymnastics and I had occasionally scanned menus for the function but never found it (In Finder it’s Command - < or Left Thumb - Left US Ring Finger).
I looked in Automator and Shortcuts and then wondered if I could assign the key combo in Terminal somehow and… Then came the moment!
In Sierra’s Keyboard Shortcuts Preferences is an option “Move focus to the next window” and behold n lo I had set it to Command - `. Which is why it worked in Mail and other apps without having an associated Menu command.
So hopping over to the MBAir I set the same Setting (née Preferences) to Left Thumb - Little Finger and Shazam! back to the wished functionality!
Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a utility that could compare your current keyboard mappings, accessibility settings, active shortcuts, extensions, etc. with the out-of-the-box vanilla state for the given macOS version you’re running, and report the differences? Man, that would save so much tedious searching and testing when trying to figure out a “why does this happen (or not happen) when I do that?” type of question, such as you had prior to the face-palm insight.
Hmm! @peternlewis do you know if it’s conceivable to write something that would capture all possible keystrokes in such a fashion that they could be compared?
Hmm, perhaps not. I could imagine an app that would trigger all possible keystrokes, but unless there’s some way to know if it “connects” with an action, it wouldn’t show anything.
Well, just a flat sorted list of Settings > Keyboard, Settings > Accessibility > Keyboard, and any other place macOS allows a keyboard shortcut to be defined would be helpful.
Or, since @peternlewis was kind enough to chime in, that would be a nice feature to add to Keyboard Maestro. Could just run it as a report, or even sync it to the assignment of a hot key to a new macro: “You’re about to assign Command-C to your new ‘Order takeout from Panda Express’ macro. Are you sure you want to override the built-in macOS ‘Copy’ command?”
There are apps that delve in to that (for example some apps can detect wether a hot key will conflict with some things). Keyboard Maestro does not delve in to such system internals, and I don’t know if those methods are public or not (I restrict Keyboard Maestro to only public APIs - which is why Keyboard Maestro versions from a decade ago still run on modern Macs).
It might be a better question for the KeyCue folks.
KeyCue could potentially build such a feature but is not capable yet.
It detects the KeyMappings on the fly but has currently now way of comparing and detecting conflicts - I’m sorry for that.
moment!