Comment by brosephius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brosephius | Hacker News Reader

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  It seems they don’t understand why it is useful to draw a distinction
  between control-C, used to cancel an operation in a terminal environment,
  and Command-C, used to copy content in a desktop setting.

anyone know what he's referring to? why is it useful to have a distinction?

  Microsoft also added a special key for opening contextual menus...
  it’s not only superfluous and clumsy for PCs using two button mice,
  but also less elegant than Apple’s convention...

I use the context menu key regularly. using a complex app without ever needing to reach for the mouse is pretty elegant, in my opinion.

  Microsoft’s contextual menu key is also typically placed on the right
  side of the keyboard, making it even more puzzlingly useless for
  right handed users. They’d have to hit the right side of the keyboard
  with their left hand while pointing the mouse with their right

I've never once used the context menu key that way, and that's not even how it works. it invokes the context menu of whatever element has the focus, not whatever element is beneath the mouse cursor.

an interesting history with unnecessary and obnoxious editorializing.

>anyone know what he's referring to? why is it useful to have a distinction?

I think because on Windows those two very different operations are overloaded onto the same key combo, and there could be situations where in context it is ambiguous which one would be invoked.

But are they overloaded? I don't remember much from my Windows/DOS days, but I thought "abort" was Ctrl+Pause?

They are overloaded in Gnome. I got caught out a few times when moving from Mac OS X where I was used to copy and pasting from the terminal having a combo that didn't clash with cancel.

ugh, nevermind, I misread the text. I read it has pressing control+c to copy text, not to cancel something. so the distinction does make sense.

though I still don't like how you can't copy and paste files with cmd+c/cmd+v in os x :)

> though I still don't like how you can't copy and paste files with cmd+c/cmd+v in os x :)

You can remap the Command key to the physical Ctrl key on your keyboard if you want; this makes some muscle-memory actions a bit more smooth across platforms.

In general -- and I'm not sure what the official / historical word from Apple is -- I've always thought that the Command key came about because Apple wanted a different key for commands that the OS could intercept, without stepping on any pre-existing application level shortcuts that used Control.

It might have been cleaner had they just kept Command reserved for shortcuts going to the OS (cut/copy/paste, open/launch, window manipulation, bossing applications around) and told developers to use Ctrl shortcuts within their applications. But I'm not sure if that distinction would have been meaningful to most users.

The Apple HIG on Modifier Keys doesn't give much in the way of rationale for Command versus Control, except to say:

> Because the Control key is already used by some of the universal access features as well as in Cocoa text fields where Emacs-style key bindings are often used, it should be used as a modifier key only when necessary.

You can do cmd+c/cmd+v to copy and paste a file. What you can't do is cut and paste (with cmd+x/cmd+v)

I agree that this is somewhat weird (though I'm sure there's a reason/opinion behind it) but it has never been a huge problem for me though.

> though I still don't like how you can't copy and paste files with cmd+c/cmd+v in os x :)

I can. I don't think I'd ever actually do that other than to verify, though.

I agree. He should throw some credit to Microsoft for making Windows so keyboard friendly. I don't know of any other modern GUI operating system that provides the same level of consistent keyboard control. Besides occasional problems like tab stops being out of order sometimes it's very possible to use a Windows PC without a mouse. I realize this isn't something most people want to do but it can be incredibly useful. I have to use a very slow IP KVM to manage a few Windows systems and mouse lag is terrible. I can navigate around the system using only the keyboard at nearly full speed. If you're doing some repetitive tasks that involve typing it's a lot easier to just get into the flow of using only the keyboard.

Most any X Windows box had this back in the 1990s and late 1980s, and (in the case of DECwindows) including "dead rodent" mode where you could navigate the cursor with the arrow keys; without the benefit of a mouse.

One of the simple innovations that MIT X had that Microsoft was frustratingly late to embrace and extend was the Style Guide. Without that, Microsoft Windows and the applications were all over the map with the short-cut usages for many years, where the style guide and the APIs tended to keep X and Motif and CDE applications rather more consistent.

http://www.recordare.com/good/hfs88.html

http://www.opengroup.org/publications/catalog/t254.htm

http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/UserExp...

Agreed. After reading the following paragraph:

"When Microsoft delivered Windows as its copycat, competing version of the Mac desktop for DOS users, it simply mapped the standard key commands Apple had originated - including the familiar Command S, Z, X, C, V for save, undo, cut, copy, paste - to control key combinations on the PC. This was another shortsighted PC mistake that would become an unsolvable annoyance for users."

...it was hard not to read this in the voice of the comic book guy. A short-sighted mistake AND an unsolvable annoyance? Really?

And yeah, I'm also a fan of the context menu key. I picked up a Logitech Illuminated keyboard last year and was very disappointed at the absence of a dedicated context menu key.

I agree 100%. I love early tech history articles like this, but he's assigning 'better/worse' valuations to things that are simply a matter of familiarity. Other than having the windows logo, the windows key and the command key functionality are extremely divergent. And yeah, his mis-characterization of the context menu key highlights his lack of familiarity with the PC keyboard conventions.

I do wish the mac keyboard had the contextual menu key, but I do like how I can use control for terminal apps and command for normal apps (the ctrl-c / command-c difference is nice).

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