Hacker News Reader

Comment by alexdbird | Hacker News Reader

When I see someone calling the keyboard things like 'inane' I read 'not what I'm used to'.

Personally I found the keyboard a breath of fresh air when I switched from Windows/Linux. The whole text editing experience is gloriously consistent and logical, though marred by a growing number of cross-platform apps that don't behave correctly.

What I think of as inane is Linux's having a slightly different key combo for copy depending on what context you're in. Or all the mad extended keyboard keys I used to use that were in a different place on every laptop.

[the keyboard experience is much less well thought out on non-English keyboards though, as another comment points out, come on Apple sort it out]

View on HN

> I read 'not what I'm used to'

That's a fair argument to be made. But in my case, I grew up on Mac OS 9 which had mostly the same key sequences. I transitioned to Windows, and that was definitely "not what I'm used to". But then moving into Linux, almost everything can be configured and the user experience across apps is consistent. Except for the terminal that needs control-shift-c instead of control-c, but that's because terminals inherit control-c for tty control.

On macOS/X? Nope, I've made up my mind: macOS has inane keyboard layouts, reduced key availability, and many things can't be reached at all by just by tabbing around a few times.

> reduced key availability

Genuine question, what do you think is missing?

I wish it was slightly easier to type a #. But OTOH it's /way/ easier to type accented characters (in either the fast way for regular use or the slow way that's much more discoverable) or different types of punctuation. Without memorising numerical codes, which is what I remember from Windows.

I certainly don't miss all the extra navigation keys, when I have the meta-keys and cursors right under my fingers, exactly the same on any Mac I use.

I'm struggling to remember more than minor differences from a PC keyboard. N.B. I'm in the UK so that might make a difference.

> Genuine question, what do you think is missing?

See my reply to the comment next to yours.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45462739

> No keypad, no pageup/pagedown/home/end/delete (I use all of them very frequently), arrow keys are misplaced and tiny (also use them a lot), no F1-F12 keys, no screenshot button, funky command key instead of using control key like any sane OS, and the command key is where the option key belongs, blah blah.

I had all of those keys when I was using Mac OS 9, 25 years ago.

Don't they have a command key and a control key?

Indeed they do, as they did 25 years, in OS 9.

And they have F1-12, though you need Fn to use them unless you invert their function in settings. And they have a numerical keypad, as well as pageup/pagedown/home/end/delete - on a full size keyboard. And you can type all those things easily using the meta keys and cursors on the bottom row anyway. And why would screenshot need its own meta key in 2025, with so many ways to screenshot or record. But I digress.

Well, I won't cover all the same things the replies do there!

I can empathise, as I always used a full size keyboard on Windows/Linux, and I chose Thinkpads and decent Dells where the extended key layout wasn't completely bastardised.

I insisted on a full size Mac keyboard for nearly a decade afterwards. Then I realised that, barring the niceness of full height cursor keys, it was a useless appendix that meant I had to move my hand ~8 inches more every single time I needed the mouse/trackpad.

What drive me crazy when using Windows for work is the abysmal copy/paste support.

Just 2 minutes ago I started an email, was composing a numbered list of steps, saw that a co-worker sent another email to the same thread, so I copied the text I was working on and replied to the latest mail.

The numbered list of steps was no longer a numbered list that I could continue auto-incrementing, but just plain text.

And that's just from one Microsoft program to itself. Copying text between two different Microsoft apps rarely preserves the formatting I want. Copying text between Microsoft and a 3rd party application is guaranteed to be an exercise in frustration.

On the other hand I cannot stand it when copy/paste preserves formatting. The last thing I want when I paste some text somewhere else is fonts, colors, hyperlinks, and numbered lists coming along with it. 90% (or more) of the time I just want the plain text.

Same. But there are a few rare instances I do want formatting preserved.

I've resorted to using PowerToys on Windows for this, it has a little utility called Advanced Paste. Win+Shift+V brings up a little modal and you can choose to paste as plain text, markdown, json, and a bunch of other functions, or you can give it your OpenAI API key and have ChatGPT format clipboard contents for you.

Yeah, even easier, SHIFT-CTRL-V on most systems is unformatted. But, I always forget, so pasting is like: CTRL-V -- goddammit -- CTRL-Z; SHIFT-CTRL-V.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com