Hacker News Reader

Comment by alexdbird | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

View on HN

> 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com