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Comment by Tehnix | Hacker News Reader

I actually use media control keys very often when playing music on my laptop, much much quicker than going into an app first.

I actually like the how OS X by default uses the fn functionality, and you press fn to access f1, f2 etc.. Except for very few games, I never actually use those keys anyways. And even then I use something like Palua[0] to automatically enable/disable the fn key based on the app that is currently in focus.

[0] http://itunes.apple.com/app/palua/id431494195

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Having to press three keys for a force reload (Ctrl+F5 on Windows/Linux) seems incredibly awkward.

I can't really imagine living without F5, F11 or F12 as a web developer.

For force reload in prefer Ctrl/Cmd-R in the meantime. Although it's more keys to press than F5 I still find it to be more comfortable because I need to move fingers less.

However I agree that software development without function keys would suck (IDE shortcuts, debugger, control, etc.)

OS X key shortcuts are very much biased towards alphabetical keys. F-key usage in standard system shortcuts is a very rare thing. In your particular example, reloading is done with Command+R while force reload is Command-Shift-R. Most OS X shortcuts follow this pattern: they're easier to remember (phonetic association) and usually make for less awkward hand positioning when used.

Because of this, on my MacBook I've mapped FKeys to do global stuff; F1 brings up Spotlight (launcher), F2 shows a Quake-style drop down terminal, and F3 bring up a popover calendar (Fantastical). The only exception is F4, which ive set up to pop open Xcode's "Quick Open" UI.

Small point: the phonetic association of Cmd-R is great for English speakers, but much less meaningful to users who don't know English

On Mac keyboards, F5 doesn't require Fn because it doesn't have a media key alternative. F5 always does F5 whether you push Fn or not. (F6 is the same way.)

You could have set up those media keyboard shortcuts yourself at the software level.

The problem with the Fn key is that it, itself, typically cannot be reassigned.

It is possible to remap pretty much any OS X key with the help of a utility like Karabiner.

Incidentally, if you try to do this with the Caps Lock key on an aluminum Apple keyboard, you will (painfully) discover, that this key has a built-in hardware delay.

Remapping it to Control (as most normal people do) means that some of your control combinations will miss, also under Windows (it's really a hardware thing).

It's my understanding that to remap Caps Lock to Control (nicely that is) on Apple's keyboards that you need to use Seil (closely related to Karabiner, and from the same dev).

https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/seil.html.en

The standard keyboard preferences have this option under "modifier keys..." Is this missing some functionality I haven't noticed?

On Apple hardware? Sure, probably. On other hardware on an Apple machine? It depends.

https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/faq.html.en

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