Comment by szszrk
16 hours ago
> and Macs offer ⌘ Command, ⌥ Option, ⌃ Control, and ⇧ Shift
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).
It took me about 1 month of pain to convert. But now I find cmd far more logical than ctrl. Ctrl asks you to give up a pinky, a home key finger, to execute common chords - far more critical than a thumb, which is already designated for space and chord/modifier keys anyway, on both Windows or Mac. As a result, Windows requires two hands or awkward movement to hit something like ctrl-a, ctrl-z, ctrl-q, etc. The equivalent on Mac can all be one-handed.
> Ctrl asks you to give up a pinky, a home key finger, to execute common chords - far more critical than a thumb
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.
It also has the benefit of (mostly) separating OS wide keyboard shortcuts from terminal commands. Copying text is always “CMD-c”, and not “usually CTRL-c, except in a terminal where it’s actually CTRL-Shift-c, because otherwise that would interfere with terminal control characters”
The "proper" CUA shortcuts work in the terminal too. (Ctrl/Shift-Ins)
This. This is why Mac makes sense to me.
Back in the day when I was doing contract work and hopping around a lot, I often had to switch between windows and mac. One of the issues I always ran into was the not necessarily the keys, but where they were positioned.
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.
How does your pinky naturally rest on Control? Your pinky should be resting on A. Your thumb rests on Space, which makes shifting it to hit Command easy.
Mine does! I presume it’s because I learned to type purely off of playing social multiplayer video games that frequently used WASD+shift/ctrl, but to this day my default left hand position on the keyboard is AWD+pinky on ctrl and thumb on space bar.
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.
Just depends on what's happening. I'm not the person you are replying to but I do the same thing. My pinky will rest on A-ish area when typing but then down on Ctrl when I'm coding because access to many navigational shortcuts is faster there and I'm doing more reading/navigating than typing
"How does your pinky naturally rest on Control?"
30 years of WASD gaming will do that.
It's just a matter of practice in the end.
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.
Yea, having trained my muscle memory for at least 10 years on macs, my daily driver desktop is finally a modern Linux distro, and I'm having the most trouble with un-learning the ⌘ shortcuts. On Linux, sometimes "copy/paste" is CTRL-C/V, sometimes it's SHIFT-CTRL-C/V (meaning I need to position my pinky AND ring finger like I'm playing guitar or something). In terminals it's never CTRL-C/V, and once in a while there is an application where it's something bonkers. I kind of miss the universal ⌘ shortcuts that the entire macOS system and all 3rd party apps followed.
i'd suggest trying out toshy... it's a game changer for linux. you get almost all of the mac keyboard shortcuts working out of the box. there's a few rough edges sometimes but generally it feels like you're using a mac wrt shortcuts. even stuff like diacritics and textbox emacs shortcuts work if you want.
I distinctly remember using Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator way back to replicate Mac way of entering some typographically correct punctuation on top of Polish layout. You could make your own custom layout as well.
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.
I always use this, maybe it'll help you: https://andrewdunning.ca/Mac-Keyboard-Layouts-for-Windows/
It's definitely a matter of what you're familiar with. As a Linux user I'm able to use the "Compose Character" key (I map the right-hand Ctrl key to it) and then use that to write diacritics just as I used to in my university computer lab in the '90s on DEC VT220 terminals!
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.
I used a Mac for a long time, but since Polish uses diacritics heavily, the default position of Option was just terrible for touch typing. I have always simply swapped Option and Command because of that. That was always there in the system's keyboard settings, so no extra tools were needed.
It was only when I moved to overriding CapsLock that I installed Karabiner.
That's not too different from macOS's approach, instead of compose-character you learn the shortcuts for composing with the diacritics or special characters. After I learnt them it has always been quite efficient, I can write in Swedish or Portuguese without thinking.
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...
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Hate this. The Apple magic keyboard is my favourite keyboard (least amount of travel/force, for speed and to be easy on my hands/wrists), and I'm paying a yearly license for a software (magic utilities) to remap the keys properly on windows. On a Mac, forget about remapping them, it doesn't work.
This is exactly the kind of software you could consider vibe coding. I think there are also free apps like Karabiner-Elements, though maybe not as polished.
karabiner-elements works very well to remap keys in macos even in very complex ways if you want. (multimodal ways held does something with other key presses but pressed by itself would emit a different code like esc or capslock)
Same experience for me. I've ended up using Karabiner-Elements. With less than 10 rules (half of which are only for the browser), you can replicate the Windows layout on your Mac, it makes everything much easier.
Feel free to share yours, I’m very interested!
This is for a Macbook Neo, your mileage may vary: fn (globe) -> left_command gives you a Windows-like Ctrl key for most of your keyboard shortcuts. This works way better than changing it in the macOS settings.
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.
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I've programmed my work keyboard to swap the places of the left windows key and left ctrl. I'll never go back to pressing ctrl with my little finger instead of my thumb again!
I've even been rebellious enough to swap the left ctrl to a command button.
In a similar boat. I quickly remapped the Mac keyboard to work as close as possible to a Win one, and it helped. But it's a leaky abstraction. And now, as some of the modifier keys are swapped, it's always confusing when I see a shortcut in a menu, never sure what to press. So I'm using fewer shortcuts than on a Win. So, for those who are 100% transitioning to Mac, my suggestion is to bite the bullet and adopt the Mac way. But for those who still live in both worlds (like me), I don't have a good answer, just that it's a constant struggle even after few years.
I tried to keep the keys mostly the same but the one I could never get used to was command + c/v/f/etc. It's just too awkward a combo for fingers. Using pinky for control on the left was much better ergonomics. So I swapped control and command keys.
I’ve done the exact same thing. I remember switching to Mac 20 years ago and the very first time I contorted my hand to use the copy shortcut and thinking…lol nope.
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I have been using Mac since 2018 daily on my day job and I still get confused by the symbols. I wish there was some system option to always display them as words or abbreviations (CMD etc) instead.
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.
Finder has its whole set of keyboard navigation shortcuts, like command + up arrow to go to parent, command + down arrow to open, ⌘3 for column view, ⌘⇧D for desktop, ⌘⇧H for home, ⌘⇧G for "go to"… I am very fond of the Finder’s navigation and as a long-time Mac user it still feels pretty clunky to try and get around on Windows. Both Windows and Mac are getting worse but it seems like Microsoft is making it worse faster, with OneDrive.
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.
They're written underneath the symbols on most (all?) Mac keyboards. At the very least, it's that way on my current MacBook, and my previous. I think they're also written on the magic keyboard I have as well.
Been using this layout for the past 12 years:
https://github.com/ivancuric/mac-hr-sane-layout
That's not a developer friendly keyboard. For menu years I'm using Dejan Vesic's keyboard on PC where programming symbols are used as primary and you get ex-yu šć latin chars via AltGr. Works great if you're 90% coding, and occassionaly write something in native language. If you have to type more, you switch the keyboard to "non-programming" layout. I tried to bring this mapping to Mac, but with limited success - I could map AltGr to right "option" key, so not to the closest button to the space ("Command"). When I switch Mac/PC there's some time to readjust muscle memory.