Marcin WicharyMar 9

Do we need yet another person crashing out about Apple’s design decisions? Am I doing it only because it’s fashionable to be on Apple Design Hate Train these days? I’ll be honest: I don’t know. But I have been bothered by Apple’s approach to some of its keyboard design for a while.

Even if you don’t care about any of this, it might be a fun visual history of the most tricky of modern modifier keys: the [Fn] key. Hope you like it!

https://aresluna.org/fn

I don’t know what is Apple’s endgame for the Fn/Globe key, and I’m not sure Apple knows either

The origin and the evolution of the most confusing modifier key

Show threadKonrad KołakowskiMar 9
@mwichary One note - "Control" on Macs are quite useful because of Terminal apps. Command key is already purpused with UI-related stuff and shortcuts, thanks to that it's possible to easily copy/paste text in terminal apps on a Mac which is a struggle on Windows & Linux 😉
Show threadMarcin Wichary
@kkolakowski Yes, but 100% of the audience for that is also people who’d very easily be capable of remapping this functionality to something else, like Alt or Globe or even Caps Lock. (If they don’t already.)
Mar 9 at 11:28pmWeb
Show threadKonrad KołakowskiMar 10

@mwichary Ok, but Terminal is a standard system component - it has to support it somehow by default , especially that POSIX conventions specifically mention „ctrl” as the button for those functionality, so it avoids confusion.

And „Control" on Macs at this point is also widely used in shortcuts across the system. I use it all the time.

But for globe/fn confusion - I fully agree 🤓

Show threadMarcin WicharyMar 10
@kkolakowski There will always be some arguments not to do something that one can fall behind to avoid hard decisions.
Show threadKonrad KołakowskiMar 10

@mwichary Sure - but in this case - I'll keep my position 😉

Globe - do not use it for system control, that's awful
Control - keep it, it's useful and used for decades 🙏

Another argument for Control - it allows for better compatibility with other OS'es on the Mac - and some users do use them, in the VMs for example, or via emulation.

Show threadMarcin WicharyMar 10
@kkolakowski These arguments would land better if not for the fact that all of your examples are very specific things that matter to <0.1% of the userbase, while the downsides are real for 100%.
Show threadKonrad KołakowskiMar 10

@mwichary How so? I really wouldn't consider developers as <0.1% of Macs userbase - even if I might be a little bit biased 😉

But even for regular users, what are the downsides, truly? I kind of get it, that with more advanced apps, more shortcuts were needed, and Control key somewhat allows for that.

Control key on the Macs is present on their keyboards since I was born, according to your article (1987) - almost 4 decades - I can only imagine the backlash 😅

(I would be pissed too)

Show threadMarcin WicharyMar 10
@kkolakowski I covered that in the essay.