TIL I use only 82% of my MacBook's standard US keyboard | Hacker News Reader

TIL I use only 82% of my MacBook's standard US keyboard

5 pointskulesh8 comments

How much of your standard MacBook keyboard's area are you actually utilising? Do you know?

Keys that I honestly never use on my Mac:

- Globe fn key (it's just too inconvenient to press)

- caps lock (I PREFER NOT TO SCREAM WHEN I TYPE)

- F3 - show all windows (I use gestures)

- F4 - spotlight (I use command + space)

- F5 - dictation

- F6 - I have no idea what the moon icon means and what it does.

- F7 - rewind (Idk, I just never press it)

- right option

- right command

- right shift

Each key has a designated area; some keys are larger than others.

Based on this, I've calculated that I don't use 17.68% of my standard US MacBook keyboard.

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Good question.

F6 half moon key is to enable disable focus, handy if you have ADHD no doubt.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255111106?sortBy=best

Got it. I’ve been in permanent DnD mode since it became available. That explains it.

I don't have a Mac, but there's a lot of keys I never use.

I pretty much never use function keys for anything but setting volume and brightness, I fairly rarely use alt, escape isn't that common.

I use the arrow keys just enough that I'd be annoyed without them but definitely not all the time.

I could probably be fine with just ctrl, shift, enter, and the printing chars, with several weeks of work to learn some alternative to pgup/down/end/home, but I really like having those as single keys.

I don't use a MacBook, so perhaps this isn't of interest to you. I've never measured my keyboard use, but based on the wear on the keycaps, here are the keys I use the most: space bar; all letters except Q, P, Z, and X; backspace; and cursor keys.

I use caps lock a ton because I’ve used the stock Mac setting to rebind it to escape.

Capslock -> Control (via System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Modifier Keys).

Out of curiosity how did you measure this?

The standard US MacBook keyboard has 78 keys. I assigned 1 unit to each regular key and more than 1 unit to the larger keys (space, shift, etc.). Then, I calculated the ratio between used units and unused units.

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