[husted]

This is not so bad in my book. There's one thing that drives me crazy though; PgUp and PgDown. Why doesn't that also move the cursor? Why only move the viewpoint? I use both Windows and OSX and this is the one thing that bothers me most.

Muscle memory dies hard.

/rant

[Someone]

Yes, it truly is annoying that, in Windows, one cannot use a few page up presses to quickly look up say a function name, then hit, say, cursor right to automatically scroll back at the point one was at :-)

The rationale for choosing this behavior in the Macintosh human interface guidelines was one of consistency: the keys simulate clicking the page up area, and clicking there does not move the cursor.

The keys _had_ to emulate mouse behavior because not all users had page up/down keys. The original Mac keyboard did not even have cursor keys.

I also think Apple that way avoided the difficult choice of what to do with the cursor. Should it stay at the same screen position, move to the top of the window, or something else? What if scrolling hits the top/bottom of the document? What if one hits page up while already scrolled upwards as far as possible? Should the cursor move within the document?

Finally, there is consistency with other programs. Drawing programs, photoshop, file explorers, etc, typically do not move the selection on page up/down.

I think they made the best choice for that time. It may no longer be the best choice in today's world where six year olds have six years of experience working with GUIs, but the eighties were quite different.