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Comment by macintux | Hacker News Reader

> And certain ones are marked but a bump or similar to make them easy to find by touch and thus use as navigational aides.

Completely off-topic, but there are two keyboard changes over time that absolutely drive me bonkers.

First, caps lock replacing control on the left, but that's not what prompted this post, but I'm still grumpy at Sun and Apple for surrendering to the idiot PC world on that.

Second, moving the bumps from "d" and "k" to "f" and "h". Pretty sure Apple also had that right originally.

When the bumps are supposed on the 2nd finger, you always feel them, even if your fingers are offset by 1. Feeling the bump on the wrong finger is great feedback to fix your hand position.

When the bumps are now in the 1st finger, if your fingers are offset by 1 you don't feel it at all, and it's much harder to notice the absence of something than it is to notice the presence of the bump on the wrong finger.

Bad designers, bad bad.

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I think you mean F and J.

edit:

As for the caps lock location, i think you can thank typewriters for that.

As best i recall, they did caps lock by having a mechanical locking lever/key attached to the left side shift key arm. Thus to do caps lock you pushed down the shift key and then locked it in place with that key. Once done you popped the key loose with a press and moved on.

That locking key is pretty much in the same location as the caps lock key is today.

Interesting about the bumps. Lately I've been rehashing some typing tutors (I learned how to type at a very young age). One of the pieces of advice I picked up was to retain your index finger on the home row when you press shift. This is actually impossible on some keyboards, but where it isn't impossible, I was surprised at how much better my typing was.

I learned on an Apple and I wonder now if having the bump on the second key has led to a few problems. I find there is a tendency for me to rotate my hand so that the fingers are no longer on the home row. One of the nice things about changing is that when I'm trying to code on the bus or train, avoiding rotating my hands keeps my elbows in and makes it possible for me to work (yes, I like working on the train :-P).

Not entirely sure what the best answer is for this.

I recently bought my first desktop keyboard and pulled all of the keys off and created my first proper Dvorak keyboard, but in the process created a keyboard without proper bumps in the home row. What I did was cut a double thick strip of electrical tape and stuck it in the correct position. This subtle bump of tape adheres extremely well and feels just as good as the button keys do.

I agree, I wonder what it would be like if you spent you're entire computer upbringing with a brail keyboard, regardless of your sighted-ness...

Bumps on my MBP late '13 are now F & J for what it's worth.

Meant f/j. d/k is better for the reasons I outlined.

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