Keyboard shortcuts in Windows appear to follow some sort of convention based on the modifier key, but I can't figure out precisely what it is. Here is my current best guess:
- Ctrl-* often does a program-specific task.
- Alt-* often focuses context menus.
- Win-* often focuses or performs tasks on Windows components.
- Fn-* often performs hardware-specific tasks.
- The behavior of keystrokes with multiple modifiers does not follow a paradigm.
- The behavior of Shift as a modifier does not follow a paradigm.
Many prominent counterexamples immediately come to mind. (Why isn't the task manager Win+***? If Alt is for context menus, then why doesn't Shift-F10 use the Alt modifier? Why does Alt+F4 close windows? Why does Win+X open a context menu if Alt is supposed to control that?)
I have no clue what the list might look like for OSX.
What are the actual conventions for Windows and OSX keyboard shortcuts?