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Comment by colmvp | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News attracts a lot of smart readers, so I'm kind of surprised that your comment actually 'fooled' people. It was very obvious sarcasm.

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> Hacker News attracts a lot of smart readers

Ahh, I see you're also trying your hand at sarcasm!

Plenty of Mac users out there without a “Home” button.

Fn+LeftArrow. RightArrow for End.

If I'm not mistaken, Fn + Left Arrow is Home on a Mac. Similar to Fn + up/down is Page Up/Down, and IIRC Fn + Right is End.

It still amazes me that people tolerate that as a substitute.

It's a key combo that requires two hands, for what on a regular keyboard is one finger.

Perhaps Mac people never hold a cup of coffee in their hand while using a computer?

right cmd + up arrow and you end up with free cofee-hand

it dorsnt work with cmd

It does for me. I've always used ⌘+up and ⌘+down to go to the top and bottom of the page. After eight years of using Macs, I didn't even know you could use the function key as suggested above.

They don’t. A Starbucks cup is too heavy to hold it for a long period of time.

I'm tired just thinking about this.

Accelerated scrolling makes the home key superfluous. Just scroll "fast".

Yeah, unless the doc is dozens+ pages long. Say, a book on a single page. Then it’s real nice to have a key sequence to get around. Going to the start or end of a long document is an infrequent enough operation I think a two hand sequence is fine.

I use both home and end constantly while coding. Writing text not so much, but it still does happen. Sure, you could do without, but...

On a mac you'd use Control-A and Control-E to navigate to the beginning and end of a line. IIRC Home and End navigate the document, not the line.

https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT201236

Hm, that would indeed be an alternative. I never tried hooking up a (windows-) keyboard to a mac, but don't see why it shouldn't work. Question is if the software or editors support the key layout.

On my old Dell xps 14 laptop, the function button was close to the arrow keys, making it very convenient to use one-handed. I actually preferred it to a separate home button, because, in a text box, I often want to jump to the start/end of a line and then move a word or two inward -- do-able using control+arrows. It was almost as good as vim, although of course I had to take my hand off the home row.

Imagine vim editing across all text fields in an OS. Would be glorious.

macOS has a lot of baked in emacs keybindings that work almost universally in text fields.

Control-A: Move to the beginning of the line or paragraph.

Control-E: Move to the end of a line or paragraph.

Control-F: Move one character forward.

Control-B: Move one character backward.

Control-L: Center the cursor or selection in the visible area.

Control-P: Move up one line.

Control-N: Move down one line.

Control-O: Insert a new line after the insertion point.

Control-T: Swap the character behind the insertion point with the character in front of the insertion point.

"Almost universally" even includes Electron apps, surprisingly!

Home and end are most useful for me when I'm writing or programming, so both of my hands are on the keyboard anyway. I think I actually find these key combos more useful than a dedicated home or end button, as I'd have to move my hands a lot further for those.

Personally, I don't get caught up on pressing two buttons on my keyboard at the same time in the circumstance I'm literally doing something else.

Well, no.

Mac people expect their Butler to carefully hold the coffee cup for them and tilt it so they can take a sip.

My butler chortled

> Perhaps Mac people never hold a cup of coffee in their hand while using a computer?

I mean, not while using the keyboard, no. Typing is a two-handed activity.

And, of course, you can always mess with key bindings for a user by creating a file at ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict with custom overrides for whatever.

CMD - up-arrow takes you to top of page.

On OS X, this also moves the insertion point, which Home doesn't.

I have Home & End on my keyboard, but they are not very conveniently located. Mapping <Super>-A and <Super>-E to Home and End is much more ergonomic (or you can use other modifier like <Ctrl> or <Alt>). Not sure though which keys should be mapped to PageUp/PageDown. Those are not terribly useful keys anyway if you use touchpad or Space.

Been a Mac user for 17 years, never knew that. Thank you.

I cannot imagine how painful those years must have been.

The moment I learned my macbook didn’t have a home button I was searching for how to emulate that.

Also, use Up Arrow to go to the beginning of the line and Down Arrow to go to the end of the line on single line text boxes (I use it often on browser address bars).

Also, system-wide in basically any text field, cmd+left/right does the same, and alt+left/right moves the cursor to the previous/next word.

Also, CMD + Arrow Up scrolls to top.

And phone users

I have an Apple keyboard with a home key and I never use it.

My work Apple keyboard has a home button. It's right there between Function and Page Up. https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MQ052LL/A/magic-keyboard-...

My home Apple keyboard has the Home button between Help and Page Up. Though, I will admit that keyboard is 2003ish. But I keep using it because it still has good action.

Is that one of the A1048 [1] "crumb tray" keyboards with the clear rim around the edge? I recently switched to one of those from an original iMac keyboard (finally got fed up with not having a forward delete key) and the key edges and the action both feel crisper. Could just be that I've been using the other one for a decade or so though.

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Keyboard#Apple_Keyboard_...

Almost. It's the Apple Pro Keyboard (M7803)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Apple_Pro_Keyboard_black....

I have to get a USB⇄USB-C dongle so I can use it on my Windows machine.

Ooh, I need to get my hands on one of those. The best of both worlds!

When people don't get humor, they're still picking up on the incongruity in it, and this bothers them.

> Hacker News attracts a lot of smart readers

Here's where I disagree

i have worked with way to many people that don't know what the navigation keys do, don't understand most of the control keys, and the only function key they know is F5.

Way too many people who have never used an actual console terminal

Only function keys I know off-hand are F2 and F12. Mostly because I prefer modal setups and only ever need those two during boot. Although without checking I have a suspicion that F5 refreshes a browser window. Am I right??

its not a surprise at all

Hacker News attracts a lot of readers who THINK they are smart or whatever that means.

Boom egos shaken

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