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)

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?

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.

The only common thing between the two is that the fn key is only used for the special modifiers under F1-F12.

I was given a magic keyboard, and my plan was to replace it with a standard one, but then I found about the keys mapping from Karabiner, and the fn key is exactly at the control position...so I started remapping.

Now, I can do almost everything with fn+key. Fn+c=command+c, fn+s=control+s and so on.

I also took inspiration from ChromeOS's replacement of Caps with Search (and a popular article from that era about the history of the hyper key), and rebound Caps to be Escape. I hardly ever use the actual escape key (which is handy on a 60 key board, because they that's just the `/~ key).

Escape (Caps) by itself is Escape. Esc+A is opens the search (goto file/line/etc. in a text editor). Esc+S is the Command Palette in apps that have one.

Very handy to be able to chord keys right next to each other!

> Suddenly, the globe key on the iPad and the hybrid globe/Fn key on the Mac were equipped with a million Windows-like tasks

It seems like Apple has been in a bind to make the iPad a better Mac and the Mac a better iPad while at the same time insisting that the iPad is its own device with its own purpose and that the Mac is its own device with its own purpose. IIRC, it took a long time to bring a keyboard and mouse to the iPad. Despite Apple’s repeated claims that it doesn’t see value in a touchscreen Mac, rumors point to one being launched next year (albeit with limitations).

Apple used to be good at cannibalizing its own product lines. But now it seems stuck with the desire to sell more iPads and more Macs without one cannibalizing or destroying another.

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...

That's the worst part about Fn, limiting user customization and wasting keyboard space. Good that this was partially dialed back, but bad that Apple added another exclusivity barrier breaking external keyboards.

> What if Apple at some point decides that Esc means something, and you already used it for something else?

You continue to use it for something else? How is it different from any other default shortcut you don't like and change?

> It’s just a modifier key.

That should be the end game! No lock in, no weird limitations like "cannot map Mission Control to ↑"

There is no hope for Apple to make anything good out of it (⌃⌘X is their peak ergonomic design), but at least you'd be able to freely use the key yourself

For me its capslock as ctrl, super (windows key) for window management, altgr for layers, right side ctrl as compose key.

There were "compose" keys that let you type characters to combine other characters -- (not ai) but they weren't forcing the person to super spock pinch the keyboard to get the character they wanted. It was "compose" then "c" then "s" to get the "ç" character.

I honestly would like to be able to do the same thing with ctrl-alt-x, eg. where ctrl alt and x are separate key presses.

Laptop keyboards will always be disliked by someone: the standard keyboard layout is awful, and dealing with this either involves trying to stick to the conventional design (wherein different people will dislike different changes); whereas a good keyboard design is going to be so far from the standard keyboard that laptops aren't going to do that.

(People will quibble about where to put the arrow keys or however many modifier keys there are or that caps lock is badly placed.. but the most glaring issue is that the spacebar doesn't need to be over 6x the size of other keys).

It's a problem if the OS is inconsistent/unclear about what scan codes are required to do things.