Twenty-seven years since Microsoft did so, Apple too wanted a Windows-style key that only they could control.
i always thought that was the command key, it even used to have an apple logo on it. and i thought it was microsoft that created the windows key because it wanted its own key like apple had.
wouldn't you also map the windows key to command when you used such a keyboard on a mac?
That’s all in the article. The author goes into the confusion that it had the Apple logo on it.
Win was conceived as a modifier reserved for the OS (not to be used by applications), while command never was. Command is for commands. If you come to the Mac from Win or Linux it often helps to think of command as what ctrl does on those systems. Ctrl on the Mac started as Terminal-Emulator specific modifier— Which to this day is great, because your universal copy shortcut (cmd-c) and interrupt (ctrl-c) are different things.
Indeed one would map win to command, but only because you need another key for a modifier that‘s not ctrl or opt/alt, conceptually they are different
Is this where I can complain about command+q? All day every day I use command+tab/tilde/w/a/s, and smack in the middle of that is command q. It's like if automobile manufacturers decided to put a third pedal between the accelerator and the brake that immediately shuts off your car in the middle of the highway. And you can't disable it, instead you can map it to such helpful things like... invert colors.
For me it’s Ctrl + C / V. I will frequently hit Ctrl + C when I want to paste, and some software helpfully copies a blank line to the clipboard if nothing is selected, thus erasing whatever I copied.
Get a clipboard manager. Being able to access my last 20 copies instead of only 1 is definitely something I wish I set up a decade before I did.
Not only useful for mistakes but also just if you jeed to eg copy someone's bank info to separate fields without doing 4 switches from invoice to bank app
Not only can disable it, but with the right tools like Karabiner elements you can turn it into something useful - double tap cmd+Q to quit: no accidental activations, but retains muscle memory
In System Settings > Keyboard Shortcuts > App Shortcuts, add the shortcut: app Safari, name "Quit Safari", command-option-Q. This will leave command-Q doing nothing, yet still allow you to quit. Repeat for other apps.
Wow. 55 images, all carefully prepared and placed, not a single AI-generated. I love the quality of this post. Not to mention, I learned something new and new perspectives.
I'm guessing nobody at Apple wears their WWSJD bracelet anymore, but for everyone else:
Back when I [Steve Jurvetson] was a student, I had Steve Jobs over to my house for a fireside chat with the GSB [Stanford Graduate School of Business] High Tech Club. When I asked my childhood hero if he would sign my Apple Extended Keyboard, he looked a little surprised to see Woz’s signature already there, and then he exclaimed, ‘This keyboard represents everything about Apple that I hate. It’s a battleship. Why does it have all these keys? Do you use this F1 key? No.’ And with his car keys he pried it right off. ‘I’m changing the world, one keyboard at a time,’ he concluded in a calmer voice.
Personally, I would take an Apple Extended Keyboard (or II ;-) ) over anything they've sold in the past, well, whenever they stopped selling them. (Typed from my Unicomp Model M Mac)
Apple just seems to be in a rush to launch half-baked features then keeps them in a weird state of stasis for years. The globe/FN key changes the keyboard layout when tapped, which is very useful since I type in multiple languages, but after a few dozen uses it simply... stops functioning. It's been broken for years. The only way I've found to fix it is to open the command line and killall Dock and killall Finder. But then language switching fails again a few more switches later. Not fixing a feature that has a whole key dedicated to it just shows how careless they've become.
Add to this that the Apple IIe had two keys with the Apple logo on them. One just an outline ‘open Apple’ and one a silhouette ‘closed Apple’. These two keys did different things to each other!
The open and closed apple keys first appeared on the Apple ///, initially next to each other on the left of the spacebar. On the Apple /// plus, the closed apple then moved to the right of the keyboard, which is what the Apple IIe inherited.
The closed apple key then appeared on the Lisa keyboard alongside an option key (both on the left of the spacebar), but the Lisa's closed Apple key acted like and is what became the Mac's command key.
> Most crucially, both keyboards introduced a new tenant: Control (⌃). This was modifier key number four, and to this day, I don’t fully understand why ⌘ wasn’t repurposed here
Because then we would have ended up with the same mess that is Windows (and Linux for that matter) when it comes to ^C being ambiguous...
> The Control key is used with terminal-emulation programs for control-key sequences. For all other applications, it is reserved for end-user-defined shortcut key sequences using a macro-key facility.
I find that a good reason. It's prioritizing the experience of terminal emulation programs. Control-C means SIGINT. And also in Cocoa text controls, many Emacs keybindings with Control are available: C-a, C-e, C-k, C-b, C-f, etc. (And it's very easy to add Emacs keybindings with the Meta key too: it's a somewhat obscure functionality but Apple never broke it. I have configured my computer with M-f and M-b for example.)
It doesn't change randomly. There are zero apps where Apple+C becomes Ctrl+C, for example. Same keys across the whole OS for cut, copy, paste; select, find; undo/redo; fullscreen, zoom; print… the list goes on.
Why is Control-C ambiguous? Oh wait, you guys use Control-C for copy, but you have forgotten that both Windows and Linux support Control-Insert for copy. That's what I use.
That would not be a good approach on Macs where most users are using reduced/laptop keyboards that have no Insert key.
In this respect, Apple got pretty lucky. Most users were not using reduced keyboards in 1987 when they originally decided to add the Control key separate from Command. Plus, Mac OS didn't even have a native terminal at the time; I assume there were terminal emulators for networking/serial use but I can't imagine that was top-of-mind for Apple either.
Regardless, Cmd-C is definitely a more convenient shortcut than Control-Insert, even if you do have the keys for the latter.
Not using the combination for one of its ambiguous purposes does not strip it of ambiguity, you've just trained yourself to avoid those circumstances.
That, of course, is one of the pain points that the article addresses: Training yourself to do so is additional cognitive load that never should have been necessary in the first place.
I flip between macOS and Linux and, occasionally, Windows. On one of my laptops, insert is also a Fn switch away, so I have to either remember that this machine needs Ctrl-Fn-F11 specifically when I'm copying from terminal.
On another keyboard I have the same problem, but insert is mapped to a different key entirely, so it is ctrl-fn-equals, and fn is on the opposite side of the keyboard from ctrl.
Contort my fingers in which way on which keyboard? Mental load and annoyance I don't need.
The button is now the shortcut for voice dictation.
At the moment, apps like Wisprflow or OpenWhispr are using it as their main shortcut, and I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before Apple integrates it as the default for Siri.
Agreed, but my biggest problem with this, is that most external keyboards don't really have an equivalent (at least in the some location). So while I have Fn mapped to my speech to text tool (Hex), I have to figure out something else when I'm at my desktop keyboard.
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i always thought that was the command key, it even used to have an apple logo on it. and i thought it was microsoft that created the windows key because it wanted its own key like apple had.
wouldn't you also map the windows key to command when you used such a keyboard on a mac?
Win was conceived as a modifier reserved for the OS (not to be used by applications), while command never was. Command is for commands. If you come to the Mac from Win or Linux it often helps to think of command as what ctrl does on those systems. Ctrl on the Mac started as Terminal-Emulator specific modifier— Which to this day is great, because your universal copy shortcut (cmd-c) and interrupt (ctrl-c) are different things.
Indeed one would map win to command, but only because you need another key for a modifier that‘s not ctrl or opt/alt, conceptually they are different
It did, but when starting history with the first Mac, it started as being absent. The Mac initially had shift, command, and option modifiers.
Apple introduced control keys (separate left and right ones) because companies writing terminal emulators needed it.
Not only useful for mistakes but also just if you jeed to eg copy someone's bank info to separate fields without doing 4 switches from invoice to bank app
From the days when both hands were on the keyboard.
Back when I [Steve Jurvetson] was a student, I had Steve Jobs over to my house for a fireside chat with the GSB [Stanford Graduate School of Business] High Tech Club. When I asked my childhood hero if he would sign my Apple Extended Keyboard, he looked a little surprised to see Woz’s signature already there, and then he exclaimed, ‘This keyboard represents everything about Apple that I hate. It’s a battleship. Why does it have all these keys? Do you use this F1 key? No.’ And with his car keys he pried it right off. ‘I’m changing the world, one keyboard at a time,’ he concluded in a calmer voice.
https://archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/...
Personally, I would take an Apple Extended Keyboard (or II ;-) ) over anything they've sold in the past, well, whenever they stopped selling them. (Typed from my Unicomp Model M Mac)
The closed apple key then appeared on the Lisa keyboard alongside an option key (both on the left of the spacebar), but the Lisa's closed Apple key acted like and is what became the Mac's command key.
https://www.nightfallcrew.com/09/12/2014/apple-iii-apple/
https://mirrors.apple2.org.za/Apple%20II%20Documentation%20P...
https://vintagecomputer.net/apple/lisa/apple_lisa_A6S0200_ke...
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Because then we would have ended up with the same mess that is Windows (and Linux for that matter) when it comes to ^C being ambiguous...
> The Control key is used with terminal-emulation programs for control-key sequences. For all other applications, it is reserved for end-user-defined shortcut key sequences using a macro-key facility.
I find that a good reason. It's prioritizing the experience of terminal emulation programs. Control-C means SIGINT. And also in Cocoa text controls, many Emacs keybindings with Control are available: C-a, C-e, C-k, C-b, C-f, etc. (And it's very easy to add Emacs keybindings with the Meta key too: it's a somewhat obscure functionality but Apple never broke it. I have configured my computer with M-f and M-b for example.)
It may have just been lack of user education, but I don't think the ctrl-a/e/etc commands to move the cursor came until they rebased onto UNIX/NeXT.
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In this respect, Apple got pretty lucky. Most users were not using reduced keyboards in 1987 when they originally decided to add the Control key separate from Command. Plus, Mac OS didn't even have a native terminal at the time; I assume there were terminal emulators for networking/serial use but I can't imagine that was top-of-mind for Apple either.
Regardless, Cmd-C is definitely a more convenient shortcut than Control-Insert, even if you do have the keys for the latter.
That, of course, is one of the pain points that the article addresses: Training yourself to do so is additional cognitive load that never should have been necessary in the first place.
I flip between macOS and Linux and, occasionally, Windows. On one of my laptops, insert is also a Fn switch away, so I have to either remember that this machine needs Ctrl-Fn-F11 specifically when I'm copying from terminal.
On another keyboard I have the same problem, but insert is mapped to a different key entirely, so it is ctrl-fn-equals, and fn is on the opposite side of the keyboard from ctrl.
Contort my fingers in which way on which keyboard? Mental load and annoyance I don't need.
At the moment, apps like Wisprflow or OpenWhispr are using it as their main shortcut, and I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before Apple integrates it as the default for Siri.