Posted by zdw 1 day ago
is a particularly humorous instance of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAS_syndrome
The Star left cluster are primarily operations that pair the left hand on the keys with the right hand on the mouse. This derives from Engelbart's Mother of All Demos with the left-side keyset paired with the right-side mouse.
Sure (this is demonstrated in the linked video, for instance) but the ZXCV group is pretty similar in that respect. Even for operations which involve the mouse it's preferable to drag only one hand far away from its home position, rather than both of them. (Especially since the video evidence https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q seems to suggest that Star users tended to move their left hand only after making the mouse selection, instead of prepositioning it.) And the Star's Undo key, which presumably doesn't require help from mouse input and is likely to be needed after a non-mouse action, isn't placed any more conveniently near the home row: it's simply in the right side-cluster rather than the left one.
https://deskauthority.saberkeebs.com/wiki.themk.org/index.ph...
https://deskthority.net/download/file.php?id=59173
Early Mac design was excellent overall, but decided not to include these keys (maybe they were leaning towards Smalltalk-like context menus?), and then seemed to go into more cryptic and power-user in-the-know keyboard direction (like with the 3-icon key including special support for flipping burgers):
https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/key-symbols-we-lost-to-ti...
Not sure if this was ever supported system-wide in any way, though.
(Yes, they could have just replaced the "regular" function keys with copy/paste keys, but I feel like that would have gone over about as well as the various times they've, uh, tried to replace the function keys)
Conflating meta keys with control keys is one of the more pernicious abominations Microsoft saddled on the tech world.
Shift - Control - Meta - Super - Hyper. Each has its place.
I bind Delete to F12 on every machine I use. It's a wonderful thing.
(I've had blank looks from a few colleagues after suggesting they press the Return key (that being the term I used to refer to the Return key) - which makes me wonder what percentage of people even know that Return is the name of a key. Perhaps we should retire the term entirely.)
Given those in charge were probably one finger typists if that, and befuddled by technology, they would collectively have decided that computers should be standardised so that learnt skills would be transferrable, and therefore they probably imposed ideas like standardised keyboard layouts.
Of course it turned out that the next generation were totally capable of operating computers without any formal training, were totally fine with different operating systems, different keyboard layouts, different applications etc, and so there was probably lots of wasted effort solving a non-existent problem.
I would also add ZX Spectrum keyboard with all the keywords on it. G/GOTO, L/LET, P/PRINT etc. Was lots of fun.
We should have engraved common actions on the keys when we could, before every software invented its own set of keyboard shortcuts.
https://f.toi.sh/fr-ca-mbp.jpg (Pardon the dust!! You never really look too closely as your keyboard until you have to take a picture of it eh?)
Tab, capslock, shift, backspace, and return are all symbols-only. I feel like I have a pretty good ambient understanding of what they mean at a glance so I think I've always seen them on fr-CA layouts I've used.
Was trying to communicate to a designer in Ontario a while ago that we could use the backspace symbol for a correction key in a PIN entry view. We were working on an iOS application so I was immediately thinking that the apple default UI font would have exactly that "chevron with a cross" symbol styled how it looks on the keyboard somewhere in it. Designer was pretty confused about it though, so I think it's probably just fr-CA keyboards.
