How Apple Keyboards Lost a Logo and Windows PCs Gained One (2007) | Hacker News Reader

How Apple Keyboards Lost a Logo and Windows PCs Gained One (2007)

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8 pointsDLWormwood31 comments

  It seems they don’t understand why it is useful to draw a distinction
  between control-C, used to cancel an operation in a terminal environment,
  and Command-C, used to copy content in a desktop setting.

anyone know what he's referring to? why is it useful to have a distinction?

  Microsoft also added a special key for opening contextual menus...
  it’s not only superfluous and clumsy for PCs using two button mice,
  but also less elegant than Apple’s convention...

I use the context menu key regularly. using a complex app without ever needing to reach for the mouse is pretty elegant, in my opinion.

  Microsoft’s contextual menu key is also typically placed on the right
  side of the keyboard, making it even more puzzlingly useless for
  right handed users. They’d have to hit the right side of the keyboard
  with their left hand while pointing the mouse with their right

I've never once used the context menu key that way, and that's not even how it works. it invokes the context menu of whatever element has the focus, not whatever element is beneath the mouse cursor.

an interesting history with unnecessary and obnoxious editorializing.

>anyone know what he's referring to? why is it useful to have a distinction?

I think because on Windows those two very different operations are overloaded onto the same key combo, and there could be situations where in context it is ambiguous which one would be invoked.

ugh, nevermind, I misread the text. I read it has pressing control+c to copy text, not to cancel something. so the distinction does make sense.

though I still don't like how you can't copy and paste files with cmd+c/cmd+v in os x :)

> though I still don't like how you can't copy and paste files with cmd+c/cmd+v in os x :)

I can. I don't think I'd ever actually do that other than to verify, though.

> though I still don't like how you can't copy and paste files with cmd+c/cmd+v in os x :)

You can remap the Command key to the physical Ctrl key on your keyboard if you want; this makes some muscle-memory actions a bit more smooth across platforms.

In general -- and I'm not sure what the official / historical word from Apple is -- I've always thought that the Command key came about because Apple wanted a different key for commands that the OS could intercept, without stepping on any pre-existing application level shortcuts that used Control.

It might have been cleaner had they just kept Command reserved for shortcuts going to the OS (cut/copy/paste, open/launch, window manipulation, bossing applications around) and told developers to use Ctrl shortcuts within their applications. But I'm not sure if that distinction would have been meaningful to most users.

The Apple HIG on Modifier Keys doesn't give much in the way of rationale for Command versus Control, except to say:

> Because the Control key is already used by some of the universal access features as well as in Cocoa text fields where Emacs-style key bindings are often used, it should be used as a modifier key only when necessary.

You can do cmd+c/cmd+v to copy and paste a file. What you can't do is cut and paste (with cmd+x/cmd+v)

I agree that this is somewhat weird (though I'm sure there's a reason/opinion behind it) but it has never been a huge problem for me though.

But are they overloaded? I don't remember much from my Windows/DOS days, but I thought "abort" was Ctrl+Pause?

They are overloaded in Gnome. I got caught out a few times when moving from Mac OS X where I was used to copy and pasting from the terminal having a combo that didn't clash with cancel.

I do wish the mac keyboard had the contextual menu key, but I do like how I can use control for terminal apps and command for normal apps (the ctrl-c / command-c difference is nice).

I agree 100%. I love early tech history articles like this, but he's assigning 'better/worse' valuations to things that are simply a matter of familiarity. Other than having the windows logo, the windows key and the command key functionality are extremely divergent. And yeah, his mis-characterization of the context menu key highlights his lack of familiarity with the PC keyboard conventions.

I agree. He should throw some credit to Microsoft for making Windows so keyboard friendly. I don't know of any other modern GUI operating system that provides the same level of consistent keyboard control. Besides occasional problems like tab stops being out of order sometimes it's very possible to use a Windows PC without a mouse. I realize this isn't something most people want to do but it can be incredibly useful. I have to use a very slow IP KVM to manage a few Windows systems and mouse lag is terrible. I can navigate around the system using only the keyboard at nearly full speed. If you're doing some repetitive tasks that involve typing it's a lot easier to just get into the flow of using only the keyboard.

Most any X Windows box had this back in the 1990s and late 1980s, and (in the case of DECwindows) including "dead rodent" mode where you could navigate the cursor with the arrow keys; without the benefit of a mouse.

One of the simple innovations that MIT X had that Microsoft was frustratingly late to embrace and extend was the Style Guide. Without that, Microsoft Windows and the applications were all over the map with the short-cut usages for many years, where the style guide and the APIs tended to keep X and Motif and CDE applications rather more consistent.

http://www.recordare.com/good/hfs88.html

http://www.opengroup.org/publications/catalog/t254.htm

http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/UserExp...

Agreed. After reading the following paragraph:

"When Microsoft delivered Windows as its copycat, competing version of the Mac desktop for DOS users, it simply mapped the standard key commands Apple had originated - including the familiar Command S, Z, X, C, V for save, undo, cut, copy, paste - to control key combinations on the PC. This was another shortsighted PC mistake that would become an unsolvable annoyance for users."

...it was hard not to read this in the voice of the comic book guy. A short-sighted mistake AND an unsolvable annoyance? Really?

And yeah, I'm also a fan of the context menu key. I picked up a Logitech Illuminated keyboard last year and was very disappointed at the absence of a dedicated context menu key.

The Windows key has become a lot more useful in 7 (and to some extent Vista), where you have

* win + [left/right arrow] = resize to left/right half of screen

* win + [up arrow] = maximize

* win + shift + [up arrow] = maximize vertically

* win + [down arrow] = minimize

* win + [#N] = invoke Nth-from-left application on taskbar

* win + shift + [#N] = start new instance of Nth-from-left app on taskbar

plus the ability to open the Windows/Start menu and start typing to search.

* Win + P = Change multi monitor setup.

"the combination of Microsoft’s overwhelmingly powerful monopoly marketing muscle and its weak and flawed technical contributions. Microsoft has delayed the progress of new technology into mainstream in far more significant ways"

Isn't that a bit over the top?

Regarding the overloading of Ctrl-C on Windows - The story is actually a bit more complex.

In DOS, Ctrl-C command was not originally overloaded. Ctrl-Ins was Copy. Shift-Del was Cut, Shift-Ins was Paste. Both Ctrl-C and Ctrl-Break were abort. Macs, however, did not originally have the Ins or Del keys, and thus needed different shortcuts. Besides, Jobs would never have copied DOS. He didn't even want arrow keys on the original Mac 128K, but finally acquiesced.

As Windows began to mimick the "look and feel" of the Mac OS, they adopted the use of the Ctrl key as a substitute for the Cmd key. In other words, it was because Microsoft was copying pre-existing commands from Apple, but transposing them to Ctrl, that they ended up with ambiguous commands.

Ctrl-Ins and Shift-Ins continued to work for several versions of Windows. At the same time, newer versions of Word and other Microsoft DOS applications began to support the newer Windows shortcuts.

Since I was thoroughly used to those shortcuts from my use of QuickBasic and Word for DOS, I continued to use the original shortcuts in Windows until they no longer worked, and only then did I switch to Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V.

Good post. The original Mac actually did ship without arrow keys and no current Apple keyboards have Ins. Not sure how long that's been the case...

Most Windows PC users are unaware of the use of either the Windows key or the contextual menu key, and some PC hardware makers refused to add the keys to their keyboards, the most notable being IBM.

i seem to recall ibm refusing to do this because of the old windows/os/2 warp battle. as soon as lenovo bought ibm's thinkpad line, they started putting windows keys on the keyboards.

That doesn't make a ton of sense; late-model IBM (consumer) computers were clearly designed to run Windows. While there may be people still bitter about the OS/2 thing, I think the company as a whole has moved on.

I think that IBM's engineers just thought that the Windows key was dumb, something that users were unlikely to care about or miss, and not worth redesigning their keyboards for. So they didn't. Given that the keyboards on some IBM products (esp. Thinkpads) were one of their defining features, I can't blame them for not wanting to mess around with it.

Personally I'm in favor of more modifier keys on keyboards, just generally; although the Windows key is lame in the sense that it's underutilized and gauche (putting the Windows logo on it), it's nice to have 3 modifiers on a keyboard in addition to shift. (Plus any hardware modifiers that you need to simulate a full 101 keys on a laptop.)

The Windows key came into being around Windows 95, right when Windows and OS/2 were at the height of competition. IBM didn't implement it then (while most of the rest of the industry did) and then, even once OS/2 was dead, just never got around to making the change.

I doubt that's why they didn't put a Windows key on their keyboards. Maybe it was a licensing issue (as Microsoft required keyboard manufacturers to license the key), or maybe it was something else, but I'd be surprised if they held out that long over OS2.

For me, the Windows key was always known more colloquially as the "crash CounterStrike" key.

>A year later in 1987, IBM released its new vision of the PC, called PS/2; it only offered a standard port for the mouse and another identical but unique port for the keyboard, a mistake that would plague PC users for the next two decades

Hmmm - for as long as I can remember the keyboard ports were colored purple, and the ones for mice were like a teal. I feel like the frequency of plugging in one's keyboard/mouse doesn't warrant it being called a plague.

The colors came a little later (PC97) and were much welcomed.

Perhaps you're not old enough to recall, but that colour coding was indroduced with the PC97 standard[1], in 1997. While 'plague' is over the top, it was a great annoyance for a decade.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_System_Design_Guide

How far back do you remember? The color-coding wasn't part of a standard until a decade later; I suppose some vendors might have started doing it sooner, but for many years you usually had to read a tiny icon, often simply plastic-embossed rather than using any ink contrast at all, on a dark and hard-to-reach part of the computer.

I use the logo key a lot in windows. Esp for the 3 shortcuts

Win+E = Opens Explorer

Win+D = Go to desktop

Win+R = Run dialog

Same here. The two other ones I use are Win+L to lock the current account and Win+Pause to bring up System Properties.

Also, Win+Pause = system properties

Win+D is actually toggle desktop. See what happens if you press it twice in a row.

Win+M = minimize all Win+U = utility manager

I use Win+D to open things on the desktop without affecting my current window setup. Win+D, double-click, Win+D quickly before the program opens.

I do try to keep my desktop clean though, I mostly use this on others' machines.

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