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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

> is typing really input method we should be optimizing?

Operating large amount of keys with all your fingers to compose and invoke complex commands is a powerful idea - especially given that people can and do learn to navigate complex systems this way intuitively, in the same way drivers eventually internalize the interface and stop thinking about it.

Having those buttons labeled with letters in a particular layout - that's not where the power of this input method comes from. Perhaps it was a necessary Schelling point, though - QWERTY keyboard is a good default. Without it, computer vendors would be tempted to experiment with their input panels, get creative with controls, making them effectively unique per model.

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Apple already screws with people's head remapping how the keys work to psychologically impose a bit of vendor lock-in once they get used to it.

I swear, every time I have to use a Mac and the End key accidentally goes to the end of the document instead of the end of the line, I get a picture in my head of this smug looking guy in a black turtleneck laughing at me.

(And yes, Mac people, I know about Karabiner. Don't bother telling me how I can adapt or how great and superior your Mac is.)

> the End key

Surprised to hear that there is a user of this button. I don't think I've ever used them, and in the last decade or so I've bought keyboards that don't have them at all.

Surprised to hear there are people, presumably in tech, that don't use the end key. I go out of my way to find keyboards that have end and home. Makes it easy to get to the the of the line, or end of the word. And frustrates me to no end when I'm using the mac

And here I’m surprised there are people, supposedly in tech, that don’t just auto hit ctrl-a or ctrl-e (or ^ or $ or A) to get to the start/end of lines. To each their own, I guess.

^a and ^e don't work on Windows and most general programs for getting to the start or end of a line.

You really should say C-a and C-e, if you're referring to the emacs commands. For the vast majority of modern computer programs, ctrl+a is "Select All".

The windows experience for string manipulation out of the box is 10000000% better than macOS.

There might be some configuration or third party software I can use to emulate it, but on windows I can treat space delimited words and lines with much more granularity than I can on macOS

I'm gonna have to massively disagree with you there. MacOS has (basic) emacs motion keys in very nearly every input in your entire machine, regardless of what app it is or who built it or what purpose the input is serving. And cmd-[common stuff] is frequently handled at the OS level via menus, so apps roughly never screw it up, and you can customize it across all of them.

Windows and Linux have absolutely nothing on OSX's consistency.

>has (basic) emacs motion keys

well there you go, youve lost the majority of people who use computers. If you use emacs and/or vim or their various flavors then you are the equivalent of an f1 driver questioning why anyone uses an automatic vehicle.

Id posit the fact that in my day jobs where I am issued a mac laptop that then plugs into a kvm switch where the keyboard does not match the same key commands as the OS unless I set up a ._ file, and that this has happened at multiple jobs going back to pre covid era, as a sign that macOS is actually a worse user experience.

The customer is always right after all

C-a, C-e, and some other Emacs basics shared by readline are universal defaults on, for instance, macOS. They don't get in anyone's way there.

I only buy keyboards, even when I wanted a compact one, with home/end keys because it's so much more productive especially in coding in a terminal.

How do you move the cursor to the end of the current line of text you're editing?

Command+Left or Right arrow

On a mac, ⌘ →

$ or Ctrl-E.

...do you use Macs? It's a lot less common to want to quickly reach the end of the document than the end of the line.

Ctrl-end to end of document, used by most other OS, is a lot more sane. There was absolutely NO technical reason to change this behavior, other than to stockholm Apple users who might think of leaving the ecosystem.

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