171–180 of 212 posts
What is the traditional F-key function? Today, on my laptop, I probably use the media controls most, then the brightness controls, then fn+f5 to refresh a page.
Is it worth defaulting to some tradition from a time when computers didn't play media or have dimmable displays? How many apps recognize the full set of f keys anyway?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another recommendation is LinearMouse. It lets you fix pretty much every problem that MacOS inflicts on mouse users: pointer acceleration, scroll behavior, click/button behavior. This and Karabiner make the OS much more usable for me.
I must be the only person in the world who actually likes pointer acceleration. Karabiner is a must though: I use it solely for "remap capslock to hyper/esc", but that's still reason enough.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I wouldn't dislike vim's modes so much if it just had one combination insert/append mode that worked like every other editor out there (including a couple other modal editors I've used), but even after adding various hacks to my vimrc to help unify the two modes, I still stumble over the behavior differences in other places. To be fair, for most values of "every other editor out there," they came after vi (if not a…
Actually, there are a number of full-screen editors that pre-dated vi. They were for mainframe operating systems, or were confined to some university or other, or were commercial products for something like CP/M made by some tiny company somewhere, and are largely forgotten; with the last magtapes or floppy discs that had copies of them long since thrown away. Unix and vi, and what escaped UCB, got remembered. But th…
> But here’s where the problem occurs. If the batteries get changed, or if the keyboard gets turned-off for an extended period, or sometimes – seemingly – just randomly… that function-lock gets switched off.
I have this problem with my Microsoft Natural keyboard; my favourite ever Microsoft product which helps me keep my RSI at bay.
Every now and again the Fn lock key gets pressed by accident. I then look very confused for some time as to why none of the Fn keys are working before I remember the dratted Fn lock key.
The Fn lock key is next to F12 so well in the range of accidental presses.
Maybe not many people drive their setup with function keys any more, I don't know.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I must be the only person in the world who actually likes pointer acceleration. Karabiner is a must though: I use it solely for "remap capslock to hyper/esc", but that's still reason enough.
FYI you can remap capslock in the built-in MacOS keyboard settings. Click Keyboard Shortcuts and then go to Modifier Keys.
Speaking of "natural scrolling" it is horrible because most scrolling is downward and "natural" is an ergonomically inferior pushing action instead of pulling. It's only natural on the actual display itself. Anothe affront to nature by Apple, along with killing the headphone jack.
On a Macbook, natural scrolling feels right on the touchpad. The real crime is not having a separate setting for a mouse. I had to use applescript tied to a keybind so I can use natural scrolling on the touchpad and toggle to regular scrolling when using a mouse wheel.
I suspect my mental model is locked into the "drag scrollbar handle down" mode from the early mouse era rather than "drag page up" mode that is intuitive to people who's first computing device had a touchscreen.
I keep Fn-lock enabled at all times and use the Fn/LCtrl-swap option in the UEFI just like the one on ThinkPads, but if I ever accidentally hit non-Fn-locked F10 the key code is interpreted by the EC instead of by the OS, so there's nothing I can do in the OS to disable it.
Even worse is that it's adjacent to PrintScrn, so it's the “oh fuck I wanted to take a screenshot and just dropped myself from the match” panic panic panic key.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every keyboard I used so far - and those were many, many, many - have the ctrl in the bottom left. Lenovo is the only weird excemption I experienced. So I believe people like me are the vast majority and you should maybe rather blame them, for introducing this weirdness in the first place.
Lenovo is the “weird exception” because thinkpads have always had the Fn key on the bottom left. Just like they still keep the track point. I would presume most people buying a thinkpad don’t want to buy “the vast majority” of laptops.
What I hate about keyboards is that you have to select your key layout when you setup your OS. Why isn't that information simply accessible over the USB protocol? Yes, I know why, because they didn't think of it.
No, it's because a lot of the time you want to use a different keyboard layout. For instance with international keyboards.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Games often bind skills or other game mechanics to the function keys. Anecdotally, I switched from `ctrl+shift+i` to F12 for opening the web inspector due to many websites capturing that keybinding for their own purpose (claude and code editors) if I didn't have a function row I'd have to find an even more arcane hotkey. They're just a nice set of purpose-undefined keys that you or the application can bind to useful…
I've played a lot of games and other than quick save, can't think of any that have used the F-row.