macfail

[jazzfish]

Still thinking seriously about this Mac switch. For awhile I was contemplating a 13" Macbook, but I'm starting to suspect that may not be enough screen real estate. Which means a Macbook Pro, which would push me up from Expensive into Really Bloody Expensive. So I stopped by the Apple store at lunchtime, figured I'd take a look at a Macbook and see what the size was like.

"I wonder how it types," I said to myself. "I'll just click at the end of the URL field..." where "click" took a bit of figuring out, but, okay, I can probably get used to that, "and select everything in it. CTRL..." what idiot put a "Fn" button where my pinky is supposed to be hitting CTRL? Does this stand for "Fail now" ? Because it's going to cause all my navigation and copy/past muscle memory to do just that. "...and Home." And I quite literally tried twice to hit the Home key in its usual places: first to the right of the Backspace Delete key, then just above it. Nothing. Who the hell designs a keyboard without a built-in Home button?

... okay, poking around online reveals that if I revert to my original plan of "laptop plus iPad" and get an iMac, I can get a "keyboard with numeric keypad," which has a six-button navigation keyclump and also puts the CTRL key in the lower left LIKE GOD INTENDED[1].

It also reveals that under OSX, Home and End don't perform the more common task of jumping to the beginning and end of the line, but instead do the 'top' and 'bottom' thing all on their own. The way to go to the beginning and end of a line is CMD+left/right. Because why would someone want to go to just the beginning or end of a line? It's much more sensible to make those common actions require a second keystroke, and for the rarely-used 'top' and 'bottom' to happen more easily so I can completely lose my place in the document.

(This Home and End behavior is very nearly unacceptable in the Neo, which was designed by ex-Apple engineers. Neo only gets a pass because I know better than to try to edit anything on its six-line screen.)

My budding love affair with Macs may have just crashed and burned, much like a second date when the other person says, "Actually, I'm feeling much better after having my engrams cleared."

Argh.

---

[1] I'm not unsympathetic to the argument that CTRL really belongs to the left of A, since I spent my first eight years using an IBM Model F.

Comments

[coraa.livejournal.com]

The major reason that I am unlikely to switch to Mac has nothing to do with the comparative benefits of PCs vs. Macs and everything to do with the fact that my computer use methods are trained from age, like, four to use PCs. It's not that the PC way is better, it's just that I think the difficulty and frustration of reteaching myself how to do everything and rewiring muscle memory for all kinds of tasks (and locating and acquiring applications that do the same things that my PC-only applications do, and...) would be too difficult to be worth it.

[jazzfish]

I wouldn't even be contemplating making a switch, except that my trailing-edge laptop is making occasional "gonna give up the ghost any day now" noises, and my desktop system was obsolete five years ago (Windows 2000 FTW). And from what I can see Windows 7 is a pretty serious paradigm shift, so I'm going to have to relearn a lot of things anyway. So why not take the opportunity to use what people keep saying is a seriously awesome way of doing things?

Answer: because if there are more headdeskingly stupid landmines like this Home thing, the Mac awesomeness is kinda overrated. I'm good with having to learn slightly different locations for keyboard shortcuts (I could probably adjust to "Fn" being where CTRL ought to); this Home thing is edging closer to "conceptual and workflow shift for no good reason" and I'm not convinced it's worth that much effort.

[voltbang.livejournal.com]

"conceptual and workflow shift for no good reason" That's my perpective on the PC/Mac discussion. I would need a good reason to relearn so much, and no one can give me a reason that would justify relearning so much. Because mac and microsoft each defend their look and feel strongly, they pretty much have to design in as many meaningless differences as they can. Each of those lawsuit denfeding look and feel differences means retraining a lifetime of computing habits. That much brain change needs a mighty good reason.

[rbandrews]

You can change which modifier key does what really easily, in System Preferences. Much more easily than the nightmarish registry hell that is remapping the caps lock key on Windows. Making home and end do what they should isn't much harder, but they do by default in Emacs, so I don't remember offhand.

About the whole "try a new, awesome way to do things" thing: I got told, a few weeks ago, "if you want things to change, you have to accept that some stuff is gonna change" :)

[rbandrews]

Also, since I can't edit: here's remapping the keys. Pretty straightforward. Changing Mac keyboards to Dvorak is also terribly easy, requiring a thin plastic prybar and about ten minutes.

[pictsy.livejournal.com]

The mere lack of a forward-delete key drives me insane.

[rockynomad.livejournal.com]

As a Mac guy who's had to get used to using PCs for work, I can agree that while the Mac has awesome features like not crashing all the damn time (my brand new high-end Dell laptop BSODs with dismaying frequency, and my then-new tower at a previous job went through 3 motherboards), the forward-delete key ought to be on every keyboard. You're right - as slick as Mac OS is, the hardware could be a bit more multifunctional.

[jazzfish]

This (Dell) laptop is the first computer I've had in, um, ever, that hasn't required major hardware work within two years of acquisition. I'm kind of shocked, honestly.

And seriously, what were the Mac keyboard designers thinking? It just utterly baffles me.

[voltbang.livejournal.com]

I don't know what I am doing wrong, but I just don't see the rate of PC failure that people complain about.

[jazzfish]

In my case, some of it's been sheer bad luck (power blips at the wrong time during bootup, or during patch installs), and some has been due to buying dirt-cheap bottom-of-the-line hardware because that's what I could afford at the time (Vimes's Boots style).

[jazzfish]

Ack, right. At least that's also present on the optional full-sized desktop keyboard. At this point I'm growing baffled that anyone manages to work at all on a Macbook. All that vaunted "design" seems to have gotten in the way of "being useful."

[rbandrews]

At this point I'm growing baffled that anyone manages to work at all on a Macbook.

Ever actually tried?

[jazzfish]

Fair enough! Also, by "anyone" I meant "any writer," which of course translates to "any writer who uses the same editing habits and patterns that I do," because those are of course the only habits anyone would ever use.

I'm genuinely surprised and shocked that, in the rush to remove useless keys (and gord knows there are some in the canonical 104: "Pause," anyone?), they nuked five that I expect people used fairly often.

[rbandrews]

You are obviously very picky particular about the tools you use for typing. Hey, I've been there. I use Dvorak, and a bunch of custom Emacs functions, and habitually buy every new pointing device that comes out on the off chance that it'll be the one that doesn't hurt my hand.

I've used Macs morning, noon, and night for eight years. Trust me, it's possible to get work done on them, even if work involves typing a lot of text. No OS anywhere is exactly what you want out of the box, but OSX is a lot easier to tweak to make it what you want than Windows XP or Vista or 7. So a half-hour in the Appletorium with a straight-out-of-the-box iMac won't be as representative as an afternoon with something you can tweak the hell out of.

Also, you do know that fn+left is beginning of line, right? It's not like you can't do it...

[plumbob78.insanejournal.com (from livejournal.com)]

God didn't intend anything about keyboards to be the way they are. The QWERTY keyboard is the way it is in order to keep a manual typewriter from getting shitted up with jams. I mean, really, what's keeping everyone using it is inertia. It's gonna screw you up. That's cool. But you not liking something isn't always the same as that thing being stupid.

I use my Mac so much anymore that I keep hitting alt at work when I mean to hit control because I'm now used to the mac layout. But maybe it's not an issue for me because I never learned to touch-type and rarely use keyboard shortcuts. I will tell you though, it's easier for me to type in Spanish on the Mac because of some nice little keyboard shortcuts for accents and tildes and upside-down punctuation.

[jazzfish]

I'm familiar with the history of QWERTY, thanks. As for the complaint about the location of the CTRL key, that was half in jest (though now that I'm at home I note that my current laptop has CTRL and Fn in reverse order from the Apple standard, which seems more sensible to me). And I certainly believe that it's easier to type nonstandard American English characters in a system where that was part of the design[1].

I stand by my assertions that a) making Home/End going to top/bottom of document and b) removing useful keys from the 104-key layout were objectively stupid design choices. Home/End I've ranted about above; as for useful keys, there's plenty of keys in the 104-key that were worth removing or combining. Trashing all of the document editing box (Ins/Del/Home/End/PgUp/PgDn) was a step too far. [Insert, I admit, is worthless. The rest are necessary.] Especially if you're going to continue to let CAPSLOCK take up twice the space of a normal key, and leave /both/ SHIFTs at three times normal.

[1] Neat tip that you may or not already know: in some Microsoft applications, like Word or Office, you can get there by hitting CTRL+modifier before the letter, so CTRL+: then e gets you ë. Which is of no help in most of the things one does, and is also kind of awkward, I know.

[plumbob78.insanejournal.com (from livejournal.com)]

Sorry to have offended. I guess my experience is just different from yours. I have seriously never used any part of that box for editing a document, except for delete, and Fn+delete was easy enough tonkern for me. I think I've use page up/down on overlong web pages.

[jazzfish]

No worries. Me, I still haven't really adjusted to the laptop keyboard having Home/End in the Wrong Places (above Bksp instead of off to the right). But I've always been a heavy keyboard-shortcut user.

[idoru.livejournal.com]

Raised on PC from age ~5-18

iBook from 2002-2008

MacBook from 2008-present,
with PC (running.. Vista? I think?) at work from July '08.

Going back and forth between the system keyboards, shortcuts, etc can be a pain in the ass (alt vs. command fingerhabits; lack of forward-delete on Mac; some differing keyboard shortcuts). That said, I only really use numpad at work (when I'm using hojillions of ascii special character codes because it's easier to remember them than it is to open the char.map every time) - I don't really notice the lack of the 'home' key on my laptop, as up-arrow eventually gets me to home of a given field. Ooh, also remembering to cmd-click vs. ctrl-click for multi-selecting, but that's a brain issue rather than functionality..

[jazzfish]

The number pad's basically useless to me as well; it's nice on occasion (typing in ISBNs, say) but mostly I get by perfectly well without it.

I really, really like having those six keys above the arrows, though. Also not having to think about keyboard shortcuts, which I use with abandon.

[zaph.livejournal.com]

To be fair, you don't actually need CTRL on a Mac as much, because they tend to use CMD for the same functions (i.e. CMD+C/CMD+V are cut/paste, CMD+P is print, etc.) And you'd use your thumb for that. But that might actually be harder to adjust to than a new location of CTRL.

[jazzfish]

Yeah, that's what I was worrying about earlier (weeks ago?), about having to relearn keyboard shortcuts, and people were like "no, they're basically the same!" If it's a different meta key, or even the same meta key in a different place, they're really not the same at all.

I suspect at this point the thing to do is to make an appointment at the Apple store and try an iMac with extended keyboard for half an hour or so, see if I can stand the keyboard shortcut remapping and how much of a pain it is.

Physiologically it seems easier to use CTRL+letters (and ALT+Tab) just because it doesn't compress the hand. Hitting ALT+C or +V (ALT being in the thumb position) feels really awkward. I'm willing to be convinced that that's something that's just my habit and experience, but... eh.

[mrstickman.livejournal.com]

One thing I've found handy when I want to undo a navigation: Undo and redo your last action. Most editors will move to whatever you changed, so you're probably where you want to be. (Obviously, this won't work in a browser situation, but it's still nice to know.)

[jazzfish]

*nod* Definitely helpful. Runs into the problem where "redo" isn't standardized so I have to try both CTRL+Y and SHIFT+CTRL+Z and get frustrated, but yeah.