The biggest smallest GUI design schism between Apple’s platforms and Windows isn’t the black vs. white cursor or where to put the menu bar. It’s the presentation of keyboard shortcuts.

On a Mac, the shortcuts are iconographic. Command is ⌘. Option is ⌥. Shift is ⇧. Control is ⌃. Fn is 🌐. There are also icons for all the other non-printing keys, from the relatively well-known Tab (⇥), through the perennially confusable End and PgDn (⤓ and ⇟), to the absolutely cryptic Esc (⎋).

On Windows, the keyboard legends are mostly text. PC lost the icon battle in the early 1980s – IBM had them on their 1970s computers, worldwide, but apparently American users of the early IBM PC hated them – and the names are spelled out (Shift and Enter and Home), or close to it (Ctrl, Esc, PgDn, Prt Sc).

Why did Apple go this way? My speculation is the revered Braun and generally hi-fi hardware: a lot of stuff sold in Europe defaults to iconography in part because that makes exporting easier. Icons are also more compact – putting ⇧⌘C in a menu or a tooltip takes up a lot less space than Shift+Ctrl+C – and more beautiful when done well. Here’s Figma’s right click menu on Mac and Windows:

But there are also challenges, as icons are more cryptic and confusing. “Command” tells you something about itself out of the box, but “⌘” is completely abstract. (Arguably, only arrow keys and symbols like ⇥ and ↵ explain themselves visually.) The attendant issue is that icons are hard to talk about if you don’t know their names, hence tons of jargon like “propeller,” “splat,” or “beanie” for ⌘, for example.

It’s a hard situation. Here is one of Mac’s own menus being thoroughly inconsistent, and an example of CleanShot using both the icon and the label to be sure:

“Why not both” seems to be the best way in places you can afford it. Apple started doing that on the keyboards too, but it took them decades to get there for modifier keys alone. Even on the 2026 computers, many other keys like Esc and Tab are still single-legended:

With all that in mind, I want to show you what I saw the other day in Google Docs, on my Mac:

This is one of those cryptic things that I would love to understand the thinking behind. Because, on the surface, this breaks so many rules:

• A strange hybrid of Mac and Windows styling: some modifier keys are spelled out, and the others are iconographic. (It’s very strange to see ⌘ conjoined with others using a plus!)
• Complex and generally uncommon dual key shortcuts – to collapse the sidebar, you really need to press ⌃⌘A and then press ⌃⌘H, in sequence.
• Three-modifier-shortcuts are in general really unpleasant and Google Docs does not seem complicated enough to warrant them.
• (You can’t see that, but they’re also unreliable! ⌃⌘A ⌃⌘H doesn’t always work and seems to depend on where the focus is.)

There is also a visual argument that cannot be ignored. We’ve been there once before; if in your menu keyboard shortcuts start overwhelming the commands themselves, you are probably doing something wrong.

The only explanation for this I can think of off the top of my head is this: these were invented somewhere else (Word?) and inherited by Docs to respect motor memory of the users transition from the older app. That still doesn’t cover the presentation, plus there is a way for Docs to redesign the shortcuts to be better for people who are starting anew.

Ultimately, I think all of this also breaks a cardinal rule: it makes keyboard operation feel more scary and intimidating than it needs to be. Shortcuts are scary enough on their own, and they don’t need any help in this area.