The secrets of your menus

I’m curious if you know of this pattern that existed for as long as I remember. On a Mac, you can hold an ⌥ key (Option) whenever any menu is open, and often see more powerful, advanced, or faster variants of existing commands, helpful for a power user. Here’s Audio Hijack and Forklift: This is not limited to just ⌥. Here in Chrome’s increasingly impenetrable View menu, ⇧ (Shift) works the same way: And in the Finder’s File menu, both ⇧ and ⌥, and even the rare ⌃ (Ctrl) get to play: This feels like a nice, thoughtful extension of the command system. It’s clever, too – the key to reveal secret things is the same key you would use for their shortcuts, so you can make the connection either cerebrally or in your fingers. There are menus that treat it slightly differently, though. Here in Finder and Safari, you can see commands themselves changing when you press ⌥, no shortcut in sight: (By the way, a nice touch in the entire system: Once the menu gets wider to accommodate longer strings,…