I don’t often use Reminders (I mostly interface with it through Fantastical), but this issue continues to drive me up the wall, and it’s so unintuitive that I have to believe I’m experiencing an extremely silly bug, or doing something wrong here.
When creating a new reminder in Reminders.app on the Mac, setting date and location info requires clicking through to the item’s little info panel. Keyboard functionality in this panel simply does not work the way I expect it to.
When I select the option to “remind me At a Time,” then click the text field and enter the hour, if I enter a two-digit number (say I want to set a reminder for 10:30 AM), the cursor exits the text box and the info panel, so when I hit the Tab key, my text cursor has moved over to the main panel’s search window.
This is not an issue if I want to set a reminder for 9:30 AM—I can press ‘9,’ then Tab, then enter ‘30,’ then Tab, then ‘AM’ without issue. It’s only when I enter a two-digit number in the hour field that this happens.
Someone please tell me I’m experiencing a bug. If this is the expected behaviour, I simply cannot understand how anyone is able to use this app.
It is not just you! I use a 24 hour clock and I cannot tab from hours to minutes. If I try to tab to minutes I get the same results that you explained.
I know I can use my mouse, I just don’t want to. The behaviour is unlike any I’ve seen in a desktop app, whether first-party or third.
For example, if you create a new event in Apple’s Calendar app, there are no issues tabbing back and forth through all the fields of “MM/DD/YYYY HH:mm a” (nor any of the other fields in the New Event popup, for that matter).
To me this just screams that people at Apple don’t use Reminders on the Mac.
I too am a keyboard-centric user and often feel stifled in Reminders. However, if you’re adding a reminder and want a specific date and time, you can use something like “Hey do the thing on 5/5 at 9 AM” and you’ll get a pop up suggestion. Use the down arrow to select it, confirm with return, and the fields will be populated automaticaly.
Since, like you, I’m using Fantastical, I use its ability to parse reminders (like it parses appointments and meetings) to add reminders from the keyboard whenever I need to do so.
It works very well. (You just need to preface the item with “Todo” or “Reminder” or something like that.
I’m not sure that it works with the free version, but I think it does. There’s a similar functionality with Calendar 366+ as well.
