[i posted about this issue, last month, and I've just discovered there was a reply from emily (RTM) -- but I was unaware of her reply, because (to my knowledge) there's no way for us to be notified when a subscribed thread receives a new post. most forums work that way. would it be possible to add that functionality to this forum, or have I somehow overlooked that feature?]


Last month I reported the delete key (the shortcut for deleting a selected task) was not working in either safari, firefox, or fluid (on a mac).

On 12.6.08, emily (RTM) replied:

>> Hi soundsgood, 

Would it be possible to confirm if this issue is happening with the forward delete key on the Mac? 

I just need to check as there are two delete keys on the Mac keyboard; one is the equivalent of the backspace key on a PC, while the other is the forward delete (same as delete on a PC). If your keyboard doesn't have two delete keys, you might need to press fn+Delete for forward delete. <<

thanks, emily. none of my macs (macbook pro, macbook, G5) has a dedicated forward-delete key, but on my macbook pro, i've discovered that hitting function-delete *does* in fact work. it's not as convenient as the single-key shortcuts, but at least it works -- but only on my portable macs.

there's no dedicated function key on full-sized mac keyboards; it only exists on portables. this is confirmed by the following apple support document (all the way at the bottom):

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1343

as a result, there appears to be *no* current solution to this issue for anyone using a full-sized mac keyboard. that is, there's no available keyboard shortcut for deleting a task, when using a full-sized mac keyboard. one has select "delete task" from the menu.

...............

FYI, since my original post, i've discovered that the reason the delete key alone does not work is that in most mac browsers, that key serves as an alternate shortcut for the "back" command (to return to the previous browser page). what happens upon hitting "delete," depends upon whether there's a previous page or not. if there's no previous page, nothing happens at all. either way, the delete keystroke is registered by the *browser*, itself -- not by the RTM web page.

there's probably no way to circumvent this without hacking the browsers. so perhaps you should list "forward-delete" (function-delete, etc.) on your shortcut page as the alternate shortcuts for mac users (on portables).

finally, emily, you mentioned that you don't yet support the fluid browser. but to clarify, fluid's behavior is actually identical to that of safari and firefox. the differences i reported at the time were related solely to whether there was a previous page loaded.

(whew!) :-)