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Comment by gilgoomesh | Hacker News Reader

This is not about enabling the F4 key, it is about enabling the Dashboard key which has been disabled for the last few versions of macOS.

Dashboard and F4 share a physical key but they are not the same and you can hold down Fn to switch between the two, regardless of the keyboard preferences. To be clear, this advice would generally apply only when you have "Use F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys" switched OFF in the keyboard preferences.

If you're using these keys as regular function keys, they work as regular function keys and have always done so.

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To be clear, this advice would generally apply only when you have "Use F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys" switched OFF in the keyboard preferences.

And for further clarification, OFF is the default.

What I don’t understand is what the author expected. If they set this setting to ON, then they won’t see the issue. If it’s OFF, then they expect a feature that isn’t an included feature anymore?

I'm not using macOS, but it sounds like the Dashboard key, which now does nothing, is not sending F4 instead.

Unfortunately that's simultaneously perfectly consistent while it also violates the principle of least surprise:

- It remains technically correct - the Fn keys are in "do special thing mode", and this key has no special thing associated with it any more

- It is now a dead key, which is extremely confusing because, now that it does absolutely nothing __under the default configuration__, it's arguable as to why it's even there anymore. From the "my computer is a physical thing that humans interact with" standpoint (as distinct from the "behold my mathematically perfect 4GHz calculator" standpoint), it kinda makes a lot of sense for that key to go "oh I just send F4 because I don't do anything special" to me. In fact NOT doing that would irritate me no end!

Anecdotally, this reminds me of the recent 1+2+3 calculator incident in iOS: it's pretty obvious all the frontline developers at Apple have touch-bar MacBooks (something something "politically-correct forced dogfooding", oooooo) so this inconsistency fell through the cracks.

Apple is starting to fragment from the bottom up in a big way...

Though I disagree with what you consider “least surprise”, that’s a helpful point of view, thanks.

Surely you can see an argument for it potentially being more confusing that F4 sends a keystroke to your active application but none of the F keys do?

Non-macOS user here on a random laptop: when I type Fn+<some key> and that key doesn't have a special function that can be invoked using the Fn key, the result is the same as not holding the Fn key.

If the behaviour of the Fn key were inversed (i.e. keys with special functions perform that function unless the Fn key is held down), I would still expect regular keys to work normally no matter where on the keyboard they are. The F# keys aren't special.

> extremely confusing

And some other hyperbole. Reality check: just about no one uses the function keys, normal users can’t be bothered to remember what they do.

Which is why Apple prints the functions they want to promote on them so these at least get some use.

F4 on my computer is Launchpad, and Dashboard is invoked by pressing Fn-F12. Are you confusing the two?

Depends how old your keyboard is:

https://www.macstories.net/news/apple-keyboards-receive-very...

I completely forgot about the dashboard, I can't remember the last time I looked at it. It used to be such a big deal / selling point of OS X.

It's where html's <canvas> element came from

I use it daily. It's on my 2010 era keyboard and I get annoyed when I'm using my laptop and it's not there

What widgets do you use? I generally prefer the slim widgets that are now available in the today view but I suppose that they can't convey as much information.

Can't speak for the parent, but I still keep a few around just as a quick reference on things:

My company does a lot of international work, so I have a row of clocks at different world times set up in a neat row. I also managed to find an old installer for istatpro's widget, which is still my favorite widget of all time (lots of computer usage information at a quick glance, very slim and real time). When I still had a mac as my work computer, I used the calendar widget frequently. I also had some webpage made widgets of our Salesforce reports and tools to quickly reference without having to open a tab for salesforce or keep it open elsewhere; the periodic snapshot of the page was enough. I keep a 5 day weather forecast up as well with some basic weather information.

I use it as...a dashboard honestly. Every time I find myself frequently searching for common information, I find a widget for it and swipe over quickly. They use almost no resources, they're always fast to update when I need the information, and they're out of the way. Maybe it's just because I was really excited about Dashboard from way back when and it's part of my workflow, but I find it super useful still for managing a lot of "often needed needed but not in real-time" data points on a single laptop screen.

It’s a testament to the fact that widgets generally don’t add enough value to be worth the hassle.

I've got one of those Macs with a TouchBar and even when my touchbar is showing F-keys, F4 sometimes just doesn't send anything (to any program). There's no way that my case has anything to do with the settings you are talking about.

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