Comment by amelius
8 hours ago
No amount of drooling over Apple keyboards will make me forget that Apple's designers didn't add keys for basic functions such as Copy and Paste, Undo and Redo.
8 hours ago
No amount of drooling over Apple keyboards will make me forget that Apple's designers didn't add keys for basic functions such as Copy and Paste, Undo and Redo.
I don't see a clear advantage over the the ZXCV shortcut placement which the Macintosh team chose. (The original Finder had no specific Redo shortcut because it was single-undo and ⌘-Z performed both undo and redo.) Even well-placed dedicated keys on a Xerox-style (or later Sun-style) "fun cluster" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBiWtJJN5zk to the left of the alphabetic cluster would have forced the hand to move further away from the home row. Of course ZXCV is much less well-adapted to the left-handed, but that would probably be true of any dedicated keys as well, unless they were mirrored on both sides of the keyboard.
> […] left of the alphabetic cluster would have forced the hand to move further away from the home row.
The Star left cluster are primarily operations that pair the left hand on the keys with the right hand on the mouse. This derives from Engelbart's Mother of All Demos with the left-side keyset paired with the right-side mouse.
> The Star left cluster are primarily operations that pair the left hand on the keys with the right hand on the mouse.
Sure (this is demonstrated in the linked video, for instance) but the ZXCV group is pretty similar in that respect. Even for operations which involve the mouse it's preferable to drag only one hand far away from its home position, rather than both of them. (Especially since the video evidence https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q seems to suggest that Star users tended to move their left hand only after making the mouse selection, instead of prepositioning it.) And the Star's Undo key, which presumably doesn't require help from mouse input and is likely to be needed after a non-mouse action, isn't placed any more conveniently near the home row: it's simply in the right side-cluster rather than the left one.
The Extended Keyboard II came with a plastic overlay for the function keys. It showed Cut/Copy/Paste for F2/F3/F4 respectively. See https://chrispeak.com/2022/04/08/apple-extended-ii for a photo.
Not sure if this was ever supported system-wide in any way, though.
The Extended Keyboard not-II had the words printed below they keys. https://deskthority.net/wiki/File:Apple_M0115_top.jpg
And there was already precedent:
https://deskauthority.saberkeebs.com/wiki.themk.org/index.ph...
https://deskthority.net/download/file.php?id=59173
Early Mac design was excellent overall, but decided not to include these keys (maybe they were leaning towards Smalltalk-like context menus?), and then seemed to go into more cryptic and power-user in-the-know keyboard direction (like with the 3-icon key including special support for flipping burgers):
https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/key-symbols-we-lost-to-ti...
Having seen laptops with dedicated copy/paste/undo/redo keys, I think Apple can be forgiven for not going down the function key rabbit hole: https://pomelo.shockfox.net/pub/img/powerlite.jpg
(Yes, they could have just replaced the "regular" function keys with copy/paste keys, but I feel like that would have gone over about as well as the various times they've, uh, tried to replace the function keys)
They can't, those keys are too far away for such common operations. And Fn keys are just as bad, so replacing with them would also have been a mistake
The least they could have done was print "Copy", "Paste", etc. on the keys that we now use for those tasks.
At least we get cmd and control as separate keys still, which makes copy/paste/… in a terminal a breeze, without either needing to sacrifice terminal control keys, or remember to use different c/p sequences in different scenarios.
I work primarily on Macs, but also have Windows machines on my desk. Switching to Windows, I always have to pause and think, "Wait… I'm supposed to press what to copy again?"
Conflating meta keys with control keys is one of the more pernicious abominations Microsoft saddled on the tech world.
Shift - Control - Meta - Super - Hyper. Each has its place.
The lack of delete has always annoyed me (and still does). I hate that I have to press fn backspace, or cursor to the end of the word.
You can also use Emacs keys (Ctrl-D) for one-handed delete. Very convenient when Caps Lock is remapped to Control.
The lack of delete has always annoyed me (and still does). I hate that I have to press fn backspace, or cursor to the end of the word.
I bind Delete to F12 on every machine I use. It's a wonderful thing.