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Comment by spullara | Hacker News Reader

Why? Do you use the Fn key all the time? I sent my Dell laptop back because the ctrl key was on the left and an unremappable Fn key was where ctrl is supposed to be.

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I press Ctrl+Shift+C/V quite often and it's for me it's easier to do with the left hand only when Ctrl is below Shift.

I imagine the macbook keyboard is fine in this situation because ctrl key is still directly below the shift key.

I like to remap Caps Lock to Control to get a similar layout as the old Sun keyboards. It also makes pressing the Control key a lot easier.

Apple too. Was a sad day when Sun and Apple gave up that fight.

At least with macOS you don’t actually need control very often.

Emacs + iTerm: I need it all the time.

Wasn't just Apple and Sun, it was almost everyone. The first IBM PC keyboards, the Apple machines, Atari and Amiga, almost all Unix workstations, etc. all had it where caps-locks sits now. I can't remember the exact IBM keyboard where it switched, but the Model M moved it and maybe a bit before that.

Caps-locks is such an infrequently used key to be taking up such valuable real estate.. I've never gotten mentally used to control being banished to the lower left. I remap on every keyboard I get.

The other thing Apple got right and PCs screwed up: the bumps on the home row used to be on ‘d’ and ‘k’. That way, even if your right hand was offset one to the right, you’d still feel the bump and notice it was under the wrong finger, which is much easier than noticing that you don’t feel a bump at all.

I don’t recall whether other vendors got that right.

If you have a real keyboard you can use the pad of your hand to hit the control key in the bottom left corner, which some people find even easier. This is definitely the easiest way to hit Ctrl-Q.

It also screws up my muscle memory. I hate the way ThinkPads do this too. At least you can remap them there too, but in some cases my work had the bios menu locked down :(

Control key has been bottom left key on most keyboards for 40 years now.

The problem isn't the CTRL key on the bottom left. The problem is the Fn key being useless and taking up a spot at all. Mac has this right.

Fn is not useless on keyboards that don't have a dedicated function key row.

true.

but double wrong is still not right

I agree in principle. But on a device this small, cramming another row onto an already tiny keyboard would be much worse ergonomically than having to deal with the Fn key, IMO.

I guess you haven't noticed the trend of laptop manufactures assigning the F keys to random device controls like volume and brightens by default then requiring you to use the Fn all the time to actually use the F keys normally.

Since I never use function keys, mine default to doing the system behaviors.

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