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Comment by burningChrome | Hacker News Reader

Back in the day when I was doing contract work and hopping around a lot, I often had to switch between windows and mac. One of the issues I always ran into was the not necessarily the keys, but where they were positioned.

Doing something basic on a mac like Copying (Ctrl + C) and Pasting (Ctrl + V) had to be done with ⌘ Command. So instead of using my pinky in natural resting by simply shifting my palm down which I was used to. Using the ⌘ Command, I had to use my thumb instead and it was always a weird shift. Having used Windows most of my life, I always had to look down to make sure I was on the right keys on a Mac.

I've tried a few times to go back, but its always been such an unnatural feeling that I just avoid it now like you do.

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How does your pinky naturally rest on Control? Your pinky should be resting on A. Your thumb rests on Space, which makes shifting it to hit Command easy.

Just depends on what's happening. I'm not the person you are replying to but I do the same thing. My pinky will rest on A-ish area when typing but then down on Ctrl when I'm coding because access to many navigational shortcuts is faster there and I'm doing more reading/navigating than typing

Mine does! I presume it’s because I learned to type purely off of playing social multiplayer video games that frequently used WASD+shift/ctrl, but to this day my default left hand position on the keyboard is AWD+pinky on ctrl and thumb on space bar.

I can consistently hit ~140wpm on artificial typing tests too!

That said, I didn’t have your parent comment’s issues with the command key swap either. I’ve used windows all my life but had to daily drive a Macbook starting in ~September of last year. It was a bit of a curve, but after maybe a month of lectures I think I was fully accustomed to the thumb cmd.

I guess I also regularly use ctrl+alt cmds on windows, which is pretty similar in position. These days I daily drive windows and Mac in the same day- hell I even remote into windows from macOS, which can be kinda fucky, but I do it regularly enough that I’m pretty tuned to what keys to hit.

"How does your pinky naturally rest on Control?"

30 years of WASD gaming will do that.

That is quite an angle you are describing, forcing you to roll your thumb under your palm exactly like Apple says you shouldn't do in its Mac Ergonomics document.

Resting your pinky naturally on control is quite easy because as it turns out, your fingers are not of equal length. So if you put your hand down on the keyboard in its most relaxed, natural position, most of your fingers may end up on the middle row and a shift. From there you only need to slide your relaxed hand downwards to get it in the perfect position for a ctrl-c/v action: Pinky on control, index finger on the x/c/v.

Your thumb doesn’t roll under your palm, it just moves a quarter inch from Space to Command.

And then you have to reach the x/c/v which is right of the command key. Your thumb would move to the left, your index finger moves over it to the right, and thereby your thumb indeed gets rolled under your palm.

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