I have been helping someone who has little experience with Windows or Mac, but used DOS for years ( until pretty recently ) and I've set them up with a simple Debian Linux running XFCE4 as the desktop. I've found that I have to teach them and also document a lot of basic computer idioms -- Control-C / X / A / V to copy, cut, select all, paste; but also more basic things, like the fact there are two pointers on the screen -- one for the mouse and one for the keyboard -- if you slide the mouse pointer to a specific point and press a keyboard key, the new key will not appear where the arrow is, it will appear where the text cursor is.
A big one was tabs. I had to get a couple of manilla folders and show them the actual tabs, and hold it up next to the browser with several tabs, and suddenly it snapped with them what the interface was trying to represent.
Control-A will select all of a web page, unless you are in the text entry box of a form, then it selects just the things in that text entry box.
I started writing this up in a little manual, it got to a dozen pages fast, and I haven't put very much in it.
If anyone knows of a place where some portion of all of this is written down, post a link !
At one point he said "You need to move the mouse up" and one of the participants actually lifted the mouse physically from the desk - which was perfectly correct for someone not being used to computers.
I always remember this when I think "isn't this obvious?" with regards to usage patterns on computers.
I corrected him and went on my rounds. I remember that a bank manager was the best of the batch. By the time I circled back to my philosophy friend, he quietly changed "exit()" back to "exist()" and the program was not compiling again! This anecdote stayed in my mind.
Some used a photocopier.
I disagree.
Even someone with no experience with computers understands, generally speaking, that the mouse is tracking the surface of the desk somehow. I have had this conversation many times (or did, back in the 1990s when mice were more novel for most people). Nobody picked it up.
The ones who do in these anecdotes are, IMO, examples of the sort of people who absolutely shut their brains off in protest when asked to work with new tech. I have been blessed in that I have only very, very rarely been asked to work with or even know such people.
I have to actively teach them how to use and navigate file folders, how to make an appointment in Outlook, and other fundamental user operations. I don't blame them, I blame the developers primarily of browser based cloud apps and OS's.
Edited to add: this includes using ctl and arrows to move by whole words, etc. fundamental stuff in the apps they would have been using since a young age. Not to mention how to use the fn key to access the other functions of Function keys, and fn-esc to switch the behavior globally on their laptops.
I remember using an (early?) Apollo computer that worked that way... I was warned by the person showing me, and a bit later he accidentally bumped the mouse while I was typing! Letters all over...
I believe this was in the era before X windows took off for unix boxes. I miss SunTools - it was nice and simple.
Out of curiosity: were they unfamiliar with the mouse, or were there programs that used a single cursor for both the keyboard and mouse? (I am aware that many text mode programs used a block for both cursors, but haven't seen a program where the two functions were combined.)
I had no idea using unix vs windows cursor movement was even an option, because linux never picks the correct method, Still have no clue how it is set(a gtk option? but qt apps are set the same.) But salutes to whatever obsd porter picked it, really made my day.
They are defined in /System/Library/Frameworks/AppKit.framework/Resources/StandardKeyBinding.dict. You can create ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict to augment or override those.
Anything built on AppKit that uses the standard text system (NSTextView, NSTextField, and the field editors that back them) supports those bindings “for free”.
For non-native apps, Karabiner Elements⁽¹⁾ is the answer, using a config like this⁽²⁾.
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-key-theme-name 'Emacs'
~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini
~/.config/gtk-4.0/settings.ini
[Settings]
gtk-key-theme-name = Emacs
There used to be an obscure internal GTK setting to properly separate control plane from command plane like on (then named) Mac OS X but IIRC it's long gone / hardcoded to only GTK on macOS.
EDIT: Found it, GTK up to 3 had proper <Primary> vs <Control>. In what I would consider to be a fatal regression, GTK 4 just aliases <Control> and <Primary>, leaving the apps to do the work.
Gtk4 makes some many dumb decisions, that I always code new programs against Gtk3. They also deleted so many useful widgets and essentially said "We don't care implement it yourself". I can't afford my programs to become unusable just because they completely lost the plot, so I intend to keep using Gtk3 forever.
Because linux is not an operating system. A specific operating system will have some specific behaviour.
I always find this curious, is readline implemented at the hardware level or something? There’s just no effing way that was a priority ticket on Microsoft Teams given all the obnoxious weirdness of their chat text field.
And bizarrely, ctrl+k, ctrl+w, and ctrl+e are more seldom. Maybe 50-50 chance for those. But trusty ctrl+a is always there.
I tried for a week to get used to the unfamiliar key bindings for text input, but then I gave up—I'm a vim user after all!—and found a system setting to use the bindings I am more familiar with. This was picked up by many applications, but notably _not_ by the Microsoft suite, which appears to have the default macOS bindings hard coded...
Oct Dec Hex Char Oct Dec Hex Char
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
000 0 00 NUL '\0' (null character) 100 64 40 @
001 1 01 SOH (start of heading) 101 65 41 A
002 2 02 STX (start of text) 102 66 42 B
003 3 03 ETX (end of text) 103 67 43 C
004 4 04 EOT (end of transmission) 104 68 44 D
005 5 05 ENQ (enquiry) 105 69 45 E
006 6 06 ACK (acknowledge) 106 70 46 F
007 7 07 BEL '\a' (bell) 107 71 47 G
010 8 08 BS '\b' (backspace) 110 72 48 H
011 9 09 HT '\t' (horizontal tab) 111 73 49 I
012 10 0A LF '\n' (new line) 112 74 4A J
013 11 0B VT '\v' (vertical tab) 113 75 4B K
014 12 0C FF '\f' (form feed) 114 76 4C L
015 13 0D CR '\r' (carriage ret) 115 77 4D MTheir misunderstanding of not being able to hover their cursor over something and interact using the keyboard honestly has me wondering why I thought the real way was intuitive, their logic there makes sense
The year is 2026. Who the heck has been using DOS (!?) until "pretty recently"? On what machine?
The DOS was DRDOS 7.22, and it was very elaborately set up -- it boots from a CDROM or USB flash disk as a live disk. On the disk is every assignment, homework, or test for any of the various courses he taught, carefully organized. They are in WordPerfect 5.1 with a few graphics in another program, and a graphing ( as in X-Y cartesian plots ) program also, all ancient freeware DOS. The three programs come up instantly on boot in different terminate-and-stay-resident screens, that you switch to with a control-alt combo, very like switching terminals in text mode linux.
This meant he could take a CDROM to school, pop it in the horibly slow and ad-laden windows computer some government program had given the school for free, boot, disconnect the printer from the network to the constarnation of other teachers and plug in a USB cable, and print his assignments, and never bring back viruses. The students when they learned of this situation would search out old viruses on the web and try to infect everything.
But using windows and mac was pretty limited to a little bit of browsing, and occasionally going to a dedicated machine with the right program already set up, to enter grades and time sheets and etc.
They are sold a few years ago, new owner just needs a good (and huge) location in the city, if they continued, nothing would change for people working there. They saw Windows as something just for minesweeper and solitaire, nothing else.
This is perhaps an indirect confirmation that The Winds of Winter is back on track.
Not "DOS" in the classical sense, but a good corporate travel agent will probably spend the majority of their day in Amadeus or Sabre on a terminal emulator app - and be much, MUCH faster than clicking around in web portals.
But that's quite different from "someone using only DOS up to only 2026".
This is traumatizing for me. I tried to switch to a mac for home use and failed because of keyboard handling. Using Polish diacritics (made with right alt) wasn't obvious at first. I was able to switch keyboard settings to mimic Linux/Windows, but it's just not there. Control and Command confusion haunts me. I dropped the platform because of this and know a few people who stayed on iphones, but also dropped Macs because of keyboard.
I once tried to "find myself" on linkedin search bar on someone else's Mac. I though "I got this, I'm a mac user now!" and managed to close the browser tab and open some random programs...
I admire people who jump between those platforms. Even more for languages that don't have standardized alphabet mappings, like Bulgarian (it seems they don't have consensus there).
Am I particularly odd for only using my thumb for space?
I use left-pinky to press either the left-ctrl or left-command. This naturally places left-ring on top of shift for ctrl+shift combos on Windows but I usually use right-shift on command+shift commands with right-pinky. Any keys I press on the right side of the keyboard during this cord are done normally since my right hand remains on the home row the entire time, on the left side I'll typically then use left-index to press the other key.
If I use left-thumb for left-command instead then I can only figure a way that involves moving that hand completely away from the home row and for shift combos I then can't reach most keys and need to move right-hand off the home position. If I use right-thumb for right command I end up with the same in the inverse. I guess one could pick the opposite command based on the keys you needed to press after but it seems like an extra thing to remember + still results in more overall movement.
It's funny how I must have typed at least many 10s of millions of keys by now and never really thought about how I type key combos.
Doing something basic on a mac like Copying (Ctrl + C) and Pasting (Ctrl + V) had to be done with ⌘ Command. So instead of using my pinky in natural resting by simply shifting my palm down which I was used to. Using the ⌘ Command, I had to use my thumb instead and it was always a weird shift. Having used Windows most of my life, I always had to look down to make sure I was on the right keys on a Mac.
I've tried a few times to go back, but its always been such an unnatural feeling that I just avoid it now like you do.
I can consistently hit ~140wpm on artificial typing tests too!
That said, I didn’t have your parent comment’s issues with the command key swap either. I’ve used windows all my life but had to daily drive a Macbook starting in ~September of last year. It was a bit of a curve, but after maybe a month of lectures I think I was fully accustomed to the thumb cmd.
I guess I also regularly use ctrl+alt cmds on windows, which is pretty similar in position. These days I daily drive windows and Mac in the same day- hell I even remote into windows from macOS, which can be kinda fucky, but I do it regularly enough that I’m pretty tuned to what keys to hit.
30 years of WASD gaming will do that.
You can then left_command -> right_option, then use that "right_option" key in Raycast (to get PowerToys Command Palette fonctionality) and in AltTab (Windows-like multitasking).
If you use Raycast, you can easily assign the Windows key+. to emojis and Windows key+V to the clipboard history, like on Windows. If you don't, you can also do it with the system tools in Karabiner.
Moving between words was probably the thing that frustrated me the most, because on Mac it uses Option instead of Command, for some reason. Cmd+Left/Right -> Option+Left/Right gives you Windows-like word jump. Cmd+Backspace -> Option+Backspace allows you to remove a word using the Ctrl+Backspace keys, like on Windows. Same thing with Cmd+DeleteForward -> Option+DeleteForward. Unlike DefaultKeyBinding.dict modifications, which people online tend to suggest, it works in all apps (including Electron ones).
In my Chromium browser (Edge), I like to remap Cmd+H -> Cmd+Y (history), Cmd+J -> Cmd+Option+L (downloads), and Cmd+Tab -> Ctrl+Tab (tab switching). I'm not sure why Chromium uses such vastly different shortcuts on the two platforms.
For the latter, that only apply when your browser is open, I suggest creating the "Complex Modifications" rules using AI, because formatting can be tricky.
Once set up, it's easy to transfer rules between computers by exporting your settings in Karabiner, so you only have to do it once.
I still think that, if you're switching permanently, it would be better to relearn everything, because these patches can make it confusing to learn new shortcuts. But it's been a lifesaver for me, since I switch between Windows and Mac every day.
I've even been rebellious enough to swap the left ctrl to a command button.
I had the same issue when I first started using a Mac decades ago (coming from being a Linux and Windows user), would get confused with Cmd and default to Ctrl, not understanding how to use diacritics, etc. A few weeks to a couple of months later and it was fine.
Nowadays I very much miss macOS diacritics shortcuts when using Windows, I only have a Windows PC for games with a Swedish/English keyboard but need to write in Portuguese sometimes, I have no idea how to use diacritics on Win11 while my keyboard is set to English, and much prefer the macOS way with Option + [N | E | I | C] (for ˜, ´, ˆ, ç) using any keyboard language, it just works. On Windows I need to change the whole keyboard language to be able to access diacritics easily, no shortcuts such as those.
However, when I still used Windows 11, I remember there being a variant of US keyboard layout built into the system that included Mac-like way of entering international diacritics. I no longer have access to a machine with Windows, but a quick Google search suggests United States – International might be what you're looking for.
It's quite a good system: you press compose-character and then two letters to be combined. E.g. CC/o/" gives ö and CC/a/o gives å and so on. If you don't know the exact combination, you can usually guess within one or two attempts e.g. just now trying to get ç I guessed CC/c/s (š) and then CC/c/c (č) before getting it right with CC/c/,
Apropos of Swedish keyboards, though, when a Mac is inflicted on me, the horrible contortions necessary to get all the usual programming bracket symbols ({[]}) are infuriating. They're a lot less annoying on a Swedish PC keyboard.
It was only when I moved to overriding CapsLock that I installed Karabiner.
Just curious why compose-character combo for å is a/o though, it would make more sense to me to be a/a.
> Apropos of Swedish keyboards, though, when a Mac is inflicted on me, the horrible contortions necessary to get all the usual programming bracket symbols ({[]}) are infuriating.
Absolutely agree, I never use the Swedish software layout even on keyboards which are physically using a Swedish layout, it's maddening finding the {[]}-_+=@ chars...
Yep, but I think it's intended to be a visual mnemonic. å looks like a tiny 'o' over the top of an 'a' even though that's not the letter combination it originated with.
> it's maddening finding the {[]}-_+=@ chars...
The series of RSI inducing vulcan neck pinches required to write C-like languages on a Nordic Mac layout drives me a bit mad, but I do have it in my body memory now when needs must!
I toy with the idea of designing my own 40%-ish keyboard just so I only have myself to blame for bad layout :)
But I did get used to the navigation and basic shortcuts after a while. Using the terminal/keyboard/IDE shortcuts (which I can set up myself) for most of the work helps a lot.
Finder is still terrible though.
A lot of the Finder shortcuts work in the save / open dialogs in apps, although they broke some of the ergonomics of those dialogs years back.
If you've ever made the jump from PC to Mac (or vice versa) at work or home, you're painfully aware that there are very real costs of switching platforms in terms of lost knowledge and productivity. In addition to flushing years of accumulated knowledge down the toilet — goodbye Outlook-Teams-OneDrive-SharePoint-Excel-Word-PowerPoint-VBA, hello GMail-Workspace-GDrive-Sheets-Docs-Slides — there's also the matter of a thousand UI and other "paper cuts" to contend with ("Why are you looking for a 'prt sc' key," condescendingly replies a Mac aficionado in response to a question from a former Windows user, "when Shift+Command+3 is so intuitive?").
I make this "jump" about 20 times per day. I have iOS, MacOS and 2 windows machines at the moment. Very frequently I will RDP into the windows machines from the MacBook.
> goodbye Outlook-Teams-OneDrive-SharePoint-Excel-Word-PowerPoint-VBA
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/mac/microsoft-...
Maybe it used to be hard to do this and I just got used to it. I have made zero attempts to normalize anything.
Beginners have to learn every system from scratch, in the limited time they spend on the computer.
The Mac boosters here would be hilariously quaint if it wasn't so frustrating. Docker images that only work on macOS Docker and break on regular Linux. Quips like "Mac is so much more reliable, just use a Mac for Docker!" that I think are genuine opinion rather than a smug joke.
Between this, AI, and all the other brain rot trends, working in tech is so depressing these days.
I've used a Windows PC my entire life. 35 years of PC.
I use my MBP M2 Pro when I travel, and for about 6 weeks every summer, and it's like pouring lemon juice into a paper cut the entire time.
Specifically, my concerns are around this exact matter: I have such muscle memory attached to, say, slamming my pinky across L-Ctrl+L-Shift+left arrow in order to quickly select just the previous word from the cursor.
This is something I do... I don't know, at least once a paragraph, as I very very quickly type and then realize I've introduced some basic typo that I need to nuke the previous word to address.
Doing this on Mac keyboards is Shift + Option + Left Arrow and... it's hell. It's absolute hell. Mashing that extreme corner shortcut with my pinkie is so baked in that there's just... no reasonable way for me to reprogram my brain to do that on a Mac.
Similarly, I have a stroke every time I try to mentally remap what things use control and what uses command. And while I could potentially remap the fn key on an MBP keyboard, I tend to use my Logitech K800 on both systems, so instead try to remap control to ALSO be command to basically get me as close to muscle memory as possible for things that need the command + shift. Since control is relatively rarely used, I think I just remapped it to caps lock. Though boy does that screw me in tmux.
Either way, when I'm typing extremely fast, being able to reliably navigate the caret and jumping around words, whole lines, etc. is just something I simply cannot get anywhere close to on a Mac and I die a tiny death every time I try.
Some nice things had been lost, some nice things had been found. Maybe it's also because OSX was also somewhat of a downgrade from OS8/OS9 in terms of user experience. Especially, Finder became a lot worse. So, people didn't feel very motivated to upgrade, and it made the switch easier... But, overall, there was very little struggle, the time we'd spend setting up the newspaper / magazine for print didn't really change.
Well... now, when I think about it, most of us used PCs at home. So, maybe it's not a fair comparison. But, even people who had Macs as their home / personal computers didn't seem to have any issue with the switch.
I think, some people kept the keyboards that came with G3/G4 (the clear heavy plastic ones with black key caps). They could be used with PCs. People didn't keep them to preserve the Mac-style layout (it wouldn't work anyways iirc), they just liked the quality of the physical product and accepted that some keys won't work the same way they did on a Mac.
Even though you could connect Mac mouse to a PC, I don't think anyone used that.
Technically DOS could have had "backspace" (delete the character BEFORE the cursor), "delete" (delete the character on/under the cursor), and "forward delete" (delete the next character AFTER the cursor).
So:
Fn-Left = scroll to top
Fn-Right = scroll to bottom
Fn-Up = scroll page up
Fn-Down = scroll page down
⌘-Up = cursor to top
⌘-Down = cursor to bottom
⌘-Left = cursor to start of line
⌘-Right = cursor to end of lineAlso Option and the right and left arrows to move from one word to the next. I don't really use this one much though
Actually it stands for _K_ill (opposite of _Y_ank), so you can get it back later too. Not sure, if that is also the case on Mac.
..while Windows is all over the place. Like why the heck is Alt+F4 used for quitting an app?? What does 4 stand for here? Death in Japanese and Chinese!?
Common User Access (CUA) in 1987 came from the world of IBM mainframes to IBM-involved microcomputer operating systems like PC-DOS and OS/2, and was the idea that there would be a common set of function keys across all 'panels' in Systems Application Architecture (SAA) applications.
Fun fact: CUA didn't originally define [F4] with its current meaning, and it was actually [F3] to exit, after [F1] for help and [F2] for toggling between two sets of function key bindings. But notice how [F5] was refresh all along.
* https://web.archive.org/web/20001117223900/http://publib.bou...
* https://web.archive.org/web/20001102070751/http://publib.bou...
Yeah consistency is great, similarly cmd+t closes a tab, wait cmd+w closes a tab not a window. and cmd+w in vlc does not close vlc, cmd+w in finder does close the window.
> similarly cmd+t closes a tab, wait cmd+w closes a tab not a window.
Because tabs are windows, and most multi-window-capable apps have the option to use tabs instead.
> and cmd+w in vlc does not close vlc
Again, in multi-window apps, closing the last window does not necessarily quit the app, but it's optional.
⌘R Reload in Safari; reply in Mail; reveal an alias's original in Finder
⌘L Address bar in browsers; message filter in Mail; clear to previous mark in Terminal.
⌘I File info in Finder; italics in text; inspector in Terminal.
I can keep going. This is not to say windows/osx is worse or better, just that claims of consistency are not suitable on either
What kind of consistency did you expect across Mail App and Safari? How do you "Reply" in browsers?
Alt+F4 through Alt+F9 are for Window Menu operations, like minimize, max. etc. Some besides Alt+F4:Close still work on older window managers, I remember SGI supported all of them.
Newer ones tend to hide or even disable the whole menu! Even Windows as it is further lobotomized.
The shift+insert,delete etc. are from MSDOS as far as I used them – they might have been copied from a previous OS.
Apple commands are not always Command+Something. Go ahead, try to reopen the last closed tab on anything you're using, with the keyboard. Whooops, you pressed three keys. Also try to take a partial screen shot or record the screen. Hey, buddy, what the heck? Why did you press 4 and 5? What do 4 and 5 even mean?
The command-shift shortcuts (function keys as they were called) were added in the 80's as such:
Command-Shift-1: Eject internal floppy
Command-Shift-2: Eject external floppy
Command-Shift-3: Take screenshot
In the System 7 era in the mid-90's, Command-Shift-4 to select an area to take a screenshot of was added.
Back then you could also install FKEY code resources into the system file to add custom ones, there was a small ecosystem of freeware/shareware function keys with useful shortcuts people would install.
> not always Command+Something. Go ahead, try to reopen the last closed tab on anything you're using, with the keyboard. Whooops, you pressed three keys.
Not always JUST Command duh. It still includes Command champ; the rest are modifiers.
I mean just ask any AI to list out all the common shortcuts for macOS and for Windows, then see which is more consistent.
> partial screen shot or record the screen ... Why did you press 4 and 5? What do 4 and 5 even mean?
4 alludes to the 4 corners of a rectangle, and 5 includes the time dimension, of course :)
> Just swapping the key caps is not enough. The keyboard also has to swap the scan codes it sends, since the code for Alt is the same as the code for ⌥, and the code for ⌘ is the same as the code for ⊞.
Dual booting between a MacOS and Linux is a painful process of manual keyboard and shorcut overrides to get the linux side somewhat to the (better) mac way of doing this.
I'm not an Apple person at all, but this is one of the hills I die on. The "Enter" key is for entering data, submitting a field, etc. The "Return" key is for returning the carriage, i.e. starting a new line. Importantly, those two are different functions! The only keys that exist twice on the keyboard are modifier keys (Ctrl, Shift, sometimes Super and Alt). The Return or Enter keys do not need to exist twice. Clearly these are meant to be two different functions, because they are two different keys on the keyboard.
To my wife's annoyance, I teach my children the correct names for these keys.
Line feed is the command that is incrementing to the new line.
Those two commands almost always run together so it quickly became possible to invoke with a single CRLF command (in ancient computer times)
> The Return or Enter keys do not need to exist twice
I use the doubled enter key much more than i have ever used the secondary modifier keys.
It is very convenient for quickly entering numeric only data with one hand, especially as it is the hand that would naturally use the big enter key.
I wouldn't take "the standard 104 keyboard layout" as a respectable design.
- If the modifier keys exist twice, then why aren't they placed symmetrically?
- Most users use a mouse with the right hand; yet the numpad is placed on the right side of the keyboard (which means it's even further away). e.g. placing keyboard in front of you in the screen then means the mouse needs to be way off centre.
- That the letters remain asymmetrical shows adherence to tradition/familiarity over improving a good design.
- The spacebar doesn't need to be >6x the size of other keys.
- Caps Lock can be useful but isn't significant enough to be worth putting where it is.
I mean. I can agree with distinguishing "Return" and "Enter". But I wouldn't refer to the typical keyboard layout as if it's a well thought out design.
Not even mentioning the general well thought out and more logical key-combinations.
The strangest key for the switch was return for file rename… I now miss it on every other system that hasn't mapped it like this.
The cmd key was a thin key of full width below the space bar. https://deskthority.net/viewtopic.php?t=12260
Although having the Help key where ⌘ is now was not that useful.
Also Pinky finger to crouch in Medal of Honor, etc :-)
Control has always been in the bottom left corner (until certain laptops started putting Fn there)
Genuinely find it better ergonomically because it’s closer to where all the keys it’s pressed with are.
Far corner ctrl makes me use my pinky and splay my hand for it while beside space ctrl feels more natural for a thumb
If you touch type, you hold your 4 fingers on ASDF. If you want to press Ctrl+C, you move your pinky to Ctrl and press C with the index finger or middle finger.
On Macintosh, you have to hold your pinky much too close to the index finger to press Command+C which are very close.
If, instead, you use thumb and index that also puts the thumb in an awkward position because you have to cross the fingers (Command is to the left of C)
What fingers do you use?
I've been looking for a good Karabiner setup that makes things work like base Ubuntu (gnome shell shortcuts). Haven't found one yet. Anyone know of a good one?
Especially one that fixes ctrl-arrow keys so they go word by word, and ctrl-shift-home/end so it only selects the 1 line instead off going all the way to the top or bottom.
Thanks!
Also, the original post is going to be a huge help for a lot of people. So if the author happens to read this, thanks!
At least on Linux you have some more choices, maybe not specifically the finer details of the keyboard stuff, but there are a bunch of things that OSX does that I really dislike. On Linux, I could change them. OSX, so far, most have been either not changeable, or appear to my newbie eyes unchangeable.
The "Start" or Windows key is the same as the "Command" key
"Alt" is the same key as "Option"
This is how every keyboard I've ever used has worked. This is usually how they work when you plug a PC keyboard into a Mac or vice-versa.
Otherwise it would be really confusing when you switch from your external keyboard to the laptop keyboard.
I subsequently have to set my Mac keyboard layout to PC to fix backticks and remove that key that is never used, and rely on my touch typing. It does also mean that no one will ever try to type on my laptop.
Eventually I settled on Karabiner Elements, an app that lets you create a simple modification specifically to target the Mac internal keyboard where you can map `non_us_backslash` (that strange unused key) to `grave_accent_and_tilde` which fixes this.
Back on Mac now with British PC and it's much less frustrating to use the keyboard. Plenty of other frustrations instead. I'd prefer to be on Linux but the hardware is just too good.
That's me! readline everywhere by default is fantastic and should be immediately copied by every Linux DE!
One note:
> Access to extra characters
For German keyboard layouts, there exists „Erweiterte Tastaturbelegung 1“ standardised in DIN 2137-01:2023-08. It's available in Windows 11 (since 24H2) and also in Debian Linux for example. It lets you enter all characters from European alphabets plus some nice extra ones. <https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/E1_(Tastaturbelegung)> has the details.
Just looked down on my windows keyboard and yes, the return key (the one above the right shift key) says "enter". That did not use to be the case. The return key used to say return and the tall key next to 3 and the numpad used to be the only enter key.
When did that change in PC land? I remember reading nerdy articles about the difference between return and enter.
But terminals and UNIX machines were more likely to use "Return", e.g. looking at a DEC VT100 or Sun SPARCstation keyboard.
edit: looks like most of the 8-bit machines like Commodore, Atari also used Return. So Enter was mostly an IBM thing.
> On a Mac, in simple input fields, ↑ and ↓ jumps to the beginning and end [...] Windows doesn’t have this convention
IIRC it worked for me on Windows (and Linux :-) as well!
I do prefer ⌘←→ as it’s more consistent. Also, ⌥←→ jumps one word back/forward on Mac, the Windows equivalient being ⌃←→.
> On Windows, [refresh is] typically F5, although some browsers now support Ctrl+R, too
Have always supported as far as I can remember :) F5 works on Mac in Firefox (and I think Chromium), but not in Safari.
> On both platforms, Fn+↑↓ does PgUp/ PgDn, and Fn+←→ does Home/End.
This will vary a lot depending on the manufacturer. ThinkPad T420 and other models from that era use those for media keys (which makes sense, they do have physical Home/End/PgUp/Dn keys).
---
Finally, a suggestion to fellow Linux users: try Mac keybindings, it’s amazing (especially if you’re e.g. running Asahi on a Macbook). Not all apps will be happy about this, but at least the KDE ones will generally follow the keybindings you set in the system settings.
> I always get a bit nervous when someone tells me that in their country, you can press the elevator button again to unset it.
The way I’ve seen this solved in a lot of countries across SEA is that you unset the elevator button by double-pressing it. It’s not intuitive, and I’ve only discovered it by accident, but it’s deterministic and idempotent: one gesture sets the button, the other unsets it.
[1]: https://unsung.aresluna.org/deterministic-vs-idempotent/
Well, I say "is used", but nothing in Windows is consistent anymore. Especially since web browsers started disrespecting the OS shortcuts. Now it seems like every application follows the web browser UI conventions instead of OS ones.
Well, if we're talking about traditional Windows behavior, there's no such thing as an app in the first place.
Some programs allowed multiple windows to be open at the same time (e.g. Notepad), and some didn't (e.g. Paint), but for those that did, they spawned each window as its own process. Closing the window closed the process. That two processes shared the same executable had no deeper meaning until Windows XP added taskbar grouping.
Except Excel, which wants to act like single application with multiple windows.
For GUI apps it sends a WM_CLOSE, because that's they way to "close" a GUI application.
For console applications it sends a message through the "Console control handler". Which the console subsystem no longer lets the application properly handle and kills the process summarily anyway.
Note that I keep saying "application" because that has been the terminology in windows forever. "GUI apps" and "console apps" were a thing before mobile.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_G3#/media/File:Apple...
I have spent literally several minutes scanning this keyboard for a physical Enter (as opposed to Return) and have no idea what the author is talking about.
When I want to type an @ on a Windows machine, I accidentally press Windows-L and lock it. For Windows users, when they use a Mac, they might be tempted to press AltGr-Q, which quits the foreground application.
So I grew up using DOS and these were pretty universal across edit/qbasic/word as well as many other third party apps. Not being able to Shift-Insert paste took my brain literally months to get used to when I switched to Mac like twenty years ago.
When I rarely find myself in Windows the muscle memory comes right back.
Does anyone else have problem scrolling diagonally on a page that's a bit zoomed in(like on HN, you zoom in a little to read the threads)? It just doesn't move smoothly and instead does a staircase shape traversal.
This used to occur on all browsers before upgrading to Tahoe, now it's mostly fixed but still persists on Safari.
For reference: https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1hh5yjo/diagonal_tra...
Shift inset is handy when ssh-ing intobabtemoyr machine with Python windows.
Windows always extends the selection in the direction of the key. But what Mac does I still haven’t managed to figure out. Sometimes it extends, sometimes it shrinks. Feels like a coin toss every time.
Mostly this makes sense to me, though it is admittedly annoying when you’ve selected a little too much with the mouse and want to deselect, you need to extend a bit first and then reverse direction.
Other interactions seem the same on Mac and on Windows.
I know many people on smaller keyboards map a single Control tap as ESC.
The only thing special about windows, is that the OS gets to own the Win key completely, which is something not too crazy and I sort of like the idea of ensuring their global shortcuts are always available.
That’s great. Now, why aren’t cut, copy, and paste one of these global shortcuts that are always available?
The crux of the matter is that I want to change my minds and/or not have to think about pressing a key and then bailing out. If it’s just a modifier key then no problem. What’s annoying is the specification “Windows-key”, and Windows OS-ification of it; that the single-key press causes an overwrought compositor animation where you get some gallery of the open applications. That’s even worse.
OS-specific abstractions should not leak to web apps under any circumstances.
Those shortcuts come from Emacs and shells adopted them.
For instance, in Portuguese, the Mac keyboard [1] has the + key two keys to the right of 0, and you use shift to input *. Meanwhile, on Windows [2], this key is one row below next to P, with the place it is on Mac occupied by «/». Most of the AltGr keys are also in different spots (particularly { and }), which makes this a major pain if you consistently switch between Windows and Mac.
Frankly I prefer the Mac layout, in part due to the Cmd/Ctrl split, but also because I believe it assigns more meaningful symbols to keys (I have literally never used «/», the internet will tell you that’s how quotations are done in Portuguese but everyone, books included, uses “/”).
I never saw any explanation as to why these differ. Does anyone know of any other languages where this happens? It doesn’t seem to be very common!
[1]: https://store.storeimages.cdn-apple.com/1/as-images.apple.co... [2]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/KB_Portu...
I can see why Microsoft thought this was a good idea, but the problem is that ONLY Microsoft apps do this, so you have two sets of shortcuts to remember. I don’t know a single person who likes this.
In AZERTY, the number row works differently. Unshifted gives symbols and commonly-used accented letters like "é" and "à", hold Shift to get a number.
In Windows keyboard, the unshifted "number 8" key corresponds to a "_" while it's a "!" in Mac. The key below Esc on Windows is literally just the superscript 2 for some reason, on Mac it's "@" unshifted, "#" shifted. We also have a key for "μ" and for "§" in Windows.
Control specifically is just a terrible modifier key for common things like edit commands. First, it sits near your pinky instead of your thumb, making chording it with Z, X, C, V, etc., really difficult.
But then... who decided that ctrl-c should be used for both copy and abort??? That's diabolical levels of messed up. In a terminal app ctrl-c aborts, so you need to use shift-ctrl-c to copy, and now you have two shortcuts for the same operation you need to remember based on context, except that in a web-based terminal in Chrome shift-ctrl-c opens "Inspect Element Mode" and now you have no way to copy!
Am I the only one who finds this astoundingly frustrating?
Ctrl-X/C/V were originally Macintosh (and maybe Xerox before that?) and then were adopted by Windows in the 3.1 era so Word for Windows would match up better with Word for Mac. But PC not having a Command key, and the Windows key not being a thing yet, they were applied to Control instead. Which of course overlapped with the other major use of Ctrl-C as "interrupt" starting back into early UNIX machines (and adopted by DOS) but... being a graphical environment they apparently didn't consider that important at the time.
Yes, the cut/copy/paste system and its shortcuts were developed at the Xerox PARC LRG as part of Smalltalk-76. They used a Control key.
>and adopted by DOS
DOS inherited it from CP/M by way of the 86-DOS clone that Gates purchased. Kildall used the TOPS-10 while developing PL/M and CP/M and adopted some of its conventions, including control-break.
Historically, of course, copy and paste on a Unix machine was a mouse thing and followed X11 conventions. You selected text with the left mouse button — automatically be saved to the primary clipboard just by virtue of being selected, no key press needed — and the middle mouse button pasted it at the location you clicked.
This is somewhat different to having the two part motion/action of select/control-C and click/control-V. It’s boiled down to just select and middle-click. Separately, you can often use shift-Insert to paste the primary buffer.
Maybe everyone has known this forever and I'm the last to find out, but I thought I'd share as it was a revelation. I middle click all the time when using a mouse, so it was nice to finally discover a replacement while using the trackpad.
Alternatively, though I don't know if it works on Mac, on X11 Linux you can middle click with touchpads by tapping with 2 fingers. Tapping with 3 fingers right clicks. That's going to work anywhere clicking does, because it's handled by the touchpad driver rather than by app convention. If it doesn't work by default, it can be configured with `synclient`.
Ctrl-C doing different things come from different os/software lineages
"far more natural" would be if you moved pinky up or down. Sideways movements are only natural for your thumb
It's not bad if you have a keyboard (e.g. topre) with control in the caps-lock position (or remap it, which I usually do).
And I also agree that the Lisa/Mac-style command-[zxcv] works really well (particularly if you use a mouse with your right hand.)
MacOS has no problem with both control-c (break) and command-c (copy) - why isn't this common in Linux as well (at least for keyboards with a command or windows key, which seems to be many, many keyboards.)
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/mxcj3ll/a/magic-keyboard-...
I see on that Apple keyboard:
• two control keys
• two option keys
• two command keys
• delete (aka backspace)
• forward delete (aka delete)
• home
• end
• page up
• page down
Ctrl-C dumb double function can also be fixed, use it to copy everywhere universally (use a better terminal with an override) and rebind cancel
> who decided that ctrl-c should be used for both copy and abort???
As usual in most of these cases, there wasn't really a single decision, just some historical artifact no one had the care to think about and fix, so it lingers in defaults
Maybe you could use thumb+Escape for Ctrl+C?
Or thumb+X is simpler - you can't cut anything in the terminal, so "cutting" the current process is a convenient combo and even has some mnemonic potential
You could also have +C copy when text is selected and break otherwise, though that modality can be a bit confusing / error-prone for some
Toshy can help but it's still not a perfect fix.
First claim has no priority over better claim. Designs can and should improve
Not being able to cut/paste easily because every tool used the Control key for something different, especially in the terminal, was infuriating.
Having the command key handle these kinds of GUI-focused interactions, and Control for most of the terminal-centric and text manipulation (Ctrl-A/E for beginning/end of line, from Emacs) makes the system great to work with.
I didn't mind anything else about my foray into Linux as a desktop OS. If we could get a Linux GUI distro that all it did was match the Mac command key paradigm, I think it would make a lot of people happy.
As a sibling comment notes, Caps Lock as Control helps a lot but it's still not as nice as Command-based shortcuts, both in hand positioning and in terms of shortcut overlap.
No, you’re not. That’s why I tend to use the archaic shift-Ins and control-Ins shortcuts for copy and paste on Windows. I feel like a dinosaur every time.
On Linux I just deal with it and curse a lot.
As for your pinky, just type the chords correctly and you won’t hurt yourself. This means typing the modifier key(s) with the opposite hand instead of the same hand that is typing the letter. So for control-z you are going to type the “z” with your left hand, so use your right hand to type “control”. That’s why the keyboard has every modifier key on both sides.
Gee thanks.
I like to have my right hand on a mouse or trackpad, so two handed chords are much less convenient.
Macs manage to make one-handed chords for copy and paste ergonomic, but on a PC it's user error?
Cmd-C is not any more ergonomic than Ctrl-C. You are only speaking from position of habit. Pressing modifier with tucked in thumb is not great for it.
If someone is concerned about ergonomics, they should buy ergonomic keyboard. Standard layouts are crap.
Decades is an exaggeration. It was less than a decade after Digital started using Control-C as a process interrupt in their PDP-10 operating systems (1967) to when Mr Tesler devised his mapping to a copy operation (1974-1976) for Smalltalk-76, and only four years after C was born. CP/M is the much more likely source of widespread usage of control-C as an interrupt, and it was contemporaneous (1974) with Tesler’s mapping.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_key
> The ⌘ symbol (the "looped square") was chosen by Susan Kare after Steve Jobs decided that the use of the Apple logo in the menu system (where the keyboard shortcuts are displayed) would be an over-use of the logo. Apple's adaptation of the symbol—encoded in Unicode at U+2318—was derived in part from its use in Nordic countries as an indicator of cultural locations and places of interest.
More here: https://www.core77.com/posts/97914/Debunking-a-Myth-Apples-C...
Also, 10 whippings for whomever at Apple decided to put the Fn/Globe key to the bottom left of laptop keyboards, and move Ctrl over. It's the first thing I swap on a Mac (used to use Karabiner, until macOS finally, years later, decided to implement the setting), and I always trip when using a colleague's laptop. These kids don't respect no traditions!
.. that rant over, I must recognize that Ctrl isn't used as much in GUI apps which prefer Cmd, and only us relatively few terminal junkies care.
[1] second most, perhaps, after swapping Delete & Backspace.
Regarding Fn even Thinkpad has now changed it so Ctrl is in the corner.
On some Windows layouts (those with the right alt = ctrl+alt trick), right alt is literally mapped to ctrl+alt. Right alt cannot be used to open the menu bar like the left alt can. This is only the case on those keyboards, on other keyboards, the right alt does move focus to the menu bar.
Mac uses cmd+arrows like Windows uses home, end, ctrl+home, ctrl+end. It uses option+arrows to move by word instead of control. (I doubt that what it considers a "word" is identical to Windows either, though many editors do override this anyway.
On some layouts (Polish is one I know of, though there are probably more), shift+backtick is a dead key on Windows and can be used to enter diacritics. Shift+accent followed by c inserts "ć". This is very painful to C++ (and Elixir) programmers, doubly so if you use the cFooManager systems Hungarian notation for class names. This is not the case on the Mac.
Option+letters are semi-dead (zombie?) keys on some layouts. For example, option+u inserts the ¨ accent, but option+u followed by another u combines them, so it inserts an ü. If you follow such a zombie key by a space, the space is swallowed and only the accent is inserted. Polish stupidly copied Option assignments from the US layout, replaced some with Polish diacritics, but never gave us replacements for the removed accents. So, we can now type symbols as useless as Ī or Ŕ, but "el niño" or "résumé" require the key hold and pop-up.
MacOS relies on menu options for things like copy and paste, as well as "Quit" and "Close Window". You should implement them by using the storyboard xCode gives you by default (or meticulously re-creating its included menu bar programmatically if your toolkit of choice doesn't let you do that), and then handle the appropriate selectors in your app if you need to. You should never handle these keyboard shortcuts yourself. MacOS is usually smart enough to figure out when these menu items should be dimmed and when they shouldn't. This doesn't work for custom UI frameworks, but if you use those, you ask for that kind of pain.
On both platforms, IMEs exist. Speakers of Chinese and Japanese want to type too.. Let them type. This involves painful OS integration that a lot of frameworks aren't doing.
On Mac, Option+backspace deletes to the beginning of the current word, but it keeps the space. On Windows (I think???) ctrl+backspace deletes the space.
On Windows, the shortcut to delete something (as in, an item in a list) is the delete key. Shift+delete is "irreversible delete" / "erase", AKA bypassing the recycle bin. On Mac, that's Cmd+Delete (which would be CMd+Backspace from a PC user's perspective).
On Mac, function keys are disabled by default (and perform the work of media keys). You need to combine them with fn to get the original behavior. Some older Macs (including older M-series macs) don't even have function keys at all, they instead have a touch bar. Don't rely on function keys for complex shortcuts.
On Mac, ctrl+arrows and command+space, while not being "reserved" in the traditional sense of the word, are often taken over by system functionality and never given to the app in the first place.