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Comment by DoingIsLearning | Hacker News Reader

I don't want to start a religious keyboard war but does anybody know the actual rationale for the Ctrl Fn swap in ThinkPads?

I agree that it is more ergonomic, but I am just curious if that is the actual reason for the swap? Or if there is some older legacy aspect or story behind it in the ThinkPads?

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They originally put it there because it's easier to locate apparently:

> The Fn key was originally placed by the ThinkPad designers in the lower left hand corner to make the key easier to locate when using the keystroke combinations. There was a rationale. This is especially handy for turning on the ThinkLight in the dark. Aim for the two extreme corners.

https://web.archive.org/web/20111115202457/http://www.lenovo...

The best place for the control key is determined by two things: finger strength and relative frequency of use. The control key is typically used far more often than alt/meta, super or (for those lucky enough to have one) hyper; as such, it should be positioned so that it may be struck with a strong finger: an index or middle finger would be great, or perhaps a thumb (as we learnt to do with Macs back in the 80s).

As such, it seems remarkable that most keyboards place it far outboard, where all one can do is strike it with the weakest finger of all. Even the superior alternative of caps lock as control is not as good as alt as control.

All of which is to say that the control key placement on the ThinkPads, while imperfect, is better than on most laptops.

Indeed, I have CTRL on left thumb as the innermost of my 3 thumb cluster keys.

Bottom left and bottom right (the control keys on both sides are useful) are fine positions for a lot of non-laptop keyboards, namely those keyboards where you can comfortably use the palm of your hand to hit control (learnt that from Xah Lee). It is problematic for laptop keyboards, however.

You got it backwards: Lenovo/IBM never made any swap, though several other manufacturers did. The fn key is still in the same location as when it first appeared in the ThinkPad 300 in 1992. That location was more common in older laptops (google some pics of early Compaq LTE or HP Onmibooks), but at some point all brands except IBM and Apple decided to place CTRL in the left corner.

I always set Caps Lock to act the same as Control. One of the benefits is that I don't have to care about the Fn/Ctrl placement.

The fn on left bottom instead of ctrl is super annoying. I would avoid this keyboard as much as possible. Or at least remap it.

There's a bios option to swap them.

Right - every Thinkpad that I ever had (6 or 7) always had that option.

ctrl/super/alt are relatively correct. People who swap ctrl to the far left are then messing up the relative correctness of the modifiers, which seems worse. Imagine a qwerty keyboard with a new letter key inserted between a and s vs one where the new letter is placed right at the edge.

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