Making the tab key work properly

OK, so here I am two months into my Mac and I find something that fixed my single biggest remaining complaint about switching from Windows to Mac.

What drove me nuts? I'm a keyboard guy and while the Mac is even more keyboard friendly than Windows when in typing surfaces like text editors, the keyboard support just disappeared when I was in a preferences window or worse, on a web based form.

Sure, on those forms I could tab between text fields but I couldn't tab into and select checkboxes or radio buttons. Arg!

If you go into System Preferences and click on Keyboard & Mouse, then select Keyboard Shortcuts, you will find an option at the bottom of the window. By default "Full keyboard access" is set to "Text boxes and lists only". If you change that to "All controls" you will be able to use the tab key to navigate in your forms and preference screens. W00t!

I found this little tip on Alex Lowe's site. He's got a video that explains it.

I'm upset with myself for taking two months to find this out!

LOL! Yeah... I was annoyed about that for the longest time till someone on a usenet forum pointed it out to me years ago.