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RobGR 10 minutes ago [-]
This is a really interesting and complete writeup.
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 !
karhuton 2 hours ago [-]
Asahi and GNOME teams, please take this as an guide to implement ”Mac input compatibility mode”!
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.
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?").
MrGilbert 25 minutes ago [-]
Painfully? I love the stimulation of my brain to learn something new. It didn’t really hurt.
IgorPartola 2 hours ago [-]
Mac got the Command key right. Windows got the Home and End keys right. Wish we could have both on one system.
bombcar 2 hours ago [-]
The delete key thing comes from how Windows descends from DOS which always had the cursor ON a character (blinking box kind of thing) whereas the Mac had the cursor as a thin line BETWEEN characters.
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).
anilakar 26 minutes ago [-]
Didn't know backspace is called delete on Apple products. Explains why one commercial vibecoded project management product used it to delete the whole item I was working on when I missed a text box.
OS-specific abstractions should not leak to web apps under any circumstances.
jasomill 21 minutes ago [-]
Over the years, I've grown so accustomed to using Mac keyboards on Windows that I swap the positions of the left Alt and Windows keys when using PC keyboards.
hmyn 25 minutes ago [-]
speaking of mac keyboard, I have macbook pro m1 with touch bar and the touch bar blinks like hell and it is been like this for years and it seems like a software bug because when you put flash light on the screen dimming sensor it goes away or atleast blinks less. I reported the bug many times, I checked apple forum lots people has the same issue but no fix yet.
is there anyone who has a solution for this? I dont want update my mac just because of this.
olyjohn 2 hours ago [-]
The demo keyboards in the article, I'm pretty sure are wrong.
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.
rahimnathwani 2 hours ago [-]
That's how it is by default but doesn't approximately everyone, when they first plug a non-Mac external keyboard into their Mac, immediately go to System Settings -> Keyboard -> Modifier keys and switch Command with Option?
Otherwise it would be really confusing when you switch from your external keyboard to the laptop keyboard.
larusso 2 hours ago [-]
Most newer keyboards I know have a toggle so the CMD and ALT switch in software. I had to switch from Mac to Win and Linux so often that I simply kept my CMD key where Super or Win is located and got used to it. Still sometimes weird when I use an actual Mac keyboard.
pchew 44 minutes ago [-]
I do this as well as swap command/option on the built in keyboards. It works great for me switching between my own computers/OSes but always a second of re-calibration when I touch someone else's Macbook.
sitharus 2 hours ago [-]
Logitech in particular do this. Their keyboards adapt to the OS so the keys are in the right place, not sure if this needs their drivers or not though.
PetitPrince 32 minutes ago [-]
> Windows still supports Shift+Delete for cut, Ctrl+Insert for copy, and Shift+Insert for paste. I am not sure how many people use these.
Shift inset is handy when ssh-ing intobabtemoyr machine with Python windows.
anArbitraryOne 47 minutes ago [-]
I thought ⌘ denoted a place of interest. I found many an interest spot just pulling off the road when seeing that
> 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.
I recently got a Linux desktop after being Mac-only for a long time and using Linux only as a deploy target, and holy shit: the modifier key situation on PCs is so bad.
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?
m3galinux 31 minutes ago [-]
On PC the "original" (Windows 3.0 and earlier) shortcuts for cut/copy/paste were Ctrl-Del, Ctrl-Ins, and Shift-Ins respectively. I believe these were inherited from some older IBM user access standards. And for the most part they still work in Windows, especially in command lines.
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.
gorgoiler 1 hours ago [-]
It is indeed frustrating.
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.
eviks 47 minutes ago [-]
You're right, but it's fixable: remap Ctrl and Alt permanently with sharpkeys then do a few rebinding fixes in something lik. Autohotkey. Your main modifier should indeed be a thumbs key just like on a Mac
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
nightfly 2 hours ago [-]
Caps Lock remapped to control. By using a keyboard where I can remap keys at the firmware level whenever possible, and in the OS when not
Ctrl-C doing different things come from different os/software lineages
eviks 44 minutes ago [-]
You're still using your pinky for the most common modifier, not a good alternative
f1shy 31 minutes ago [-]
But in a far more natural form.
eviks 5 minutes ago [-]
Actually, in many cases the opposite. If you have a classical Corner control, it can be used with a part of your palm with less movement, and you finger doesn't contort
"far more natural" would be if you moved pinky up or down. Sideways movements are only natural for your thumb
wpm 2 hours ago [-]
Nope, it is a crying shame the early Linux/Unix desktop environments copied the Windows/IBM CUA shortcuts and now we have to fight every app and every different method there is for setting keyboard shortcuts to fix it. The Ctrl key was already claimed for use in the terminal for signals and line navigation.
Toshy can help but it's still not a perfect fix.
eviks 45 minutes ago [-]
> The Ctrl key was already claimed for use in the terminal for signals and line navigation.
First claim has no priority over better claim. Designs can and should improve
dima55 2 hours ago [-]
Of (home,end,pgup,pgdown,delete,backspace) the mac has just backspace. And they have just a single control key and such. Clearly the mac keyboard is designed by people that have no idea how to type. There's no "standard windows keyboard" anymore, but even the worst is still worlds better than whatever apple puts out.
monk_grilla 55 minutes ago [-]
I significantly prefer the Mac way of chording Option or Command with arrow keys to achieve those functions. One of the main reasons I can't get used to Linux desktops is that I can't use Opt-arrow to navigate by word and Cmd-arrow to navigate by line. Cmd-arrow makes much more sense than a dedicated Home and End button imho.
sitharus 2 hours ago [-]
On space limited laptop keyboards yes, but you can get all of those with chording. Except the right hand control key of course.
> First, it sits near your pinky instead of 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.)
db48x 37 minutes ago [-]
Control-c meant cancel for decades before some idiot decided that it ought to mean copy instead.
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.
spankalee 34 minutes ago [-]
> just type the chords correctly
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?
zdw 2 hours ago [-]
I entirely agree. At $NEWJOB, I had a Linux laptop for a bit while a Mac was on backorder.
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.
jeroenhd 36 minutes ago [-]
Shift+Insert will let you paste anywhere. It's an IBM thing historically, I believe, and it works pretty much anywhere. Also useful for websites that try to block normal ctrl+v.
cosmic_cheese 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah this drives me crazy too.
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.
kergonath 19 minutes ago [-]
> Am I the only one who finds this astoundingly frustrating?
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.
musicale 2 hours ago [-]
I just wish Apple would get back to making decent electromechanical keyboards.
AceJohnny2 1 hours ago [-]
The most [1] annoying difference to me is the Alt/Cmd vs Win/Alt key swaps. In this case, Mac has precedence, and Microsoft decided they would place their new Windows key to the left of Alt.
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.
ankurdhama 3 hours ago [-]
mac treats modifier keys like modifier keys whereas windows treat super key as modifier key and start menu key (which is weird)
dietr1ch 1 hours ago [-]
Tapping modifiers keys is something you might want to do.
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.
eviks 38 minutes ago [-]
It is crazy because it's a huge waste of relatively ergonomic real estate (win key has a better position than control as you can use your thumb), and the OS isn't competent enough to utilize the whole layer better than what a user/app could do (they couldn't even do window management with Win key good), so its global shortcuts shouldn't always be available
wpm 2 hours ago [-]
> A small group of vocal users love these.
That's me! readline everywhere by default is fantastic and should be immediately copied by every Linux DE!
anonymous344 1 hours ago [-]
what is most awful, is that sublime text isnt the same with windows keyboard in mac, than it is in windows. and cannot be..
so had to abandon mac
phplovesong 30 minutes ago [-]
I wish i had mac hardware with a fully supported Linux OS. There are some options but most have bad hardware. I kind of wish Apple would just "unlock" its hardware for other options like Linux.
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 !
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.
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?").
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).
OS-specific abstractions should not leak to web apps under any circumstances.
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.
Shift inset is handy when ssh-ing intobabtemoyr machine with Python windows.
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...
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.
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.
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
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
Toshy can help but it's still not a perfect fix.
First claim has no priority over better claim. Designs can and should improve
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
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.)
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?
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.
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.
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 me! readline everywhere by default is fantastic and should be immediately copied by every Linux DE!