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.

[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" :)

[pictsy.livejournal.com]

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

[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.

[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..

[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.

[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.)