I don't know Apple's endgame for the Fn/Globe key–or if Apple does

Twenty-seven years since Microsoft did so, Apple too wanted a Windows-style key that only they could control.

i always thought that was the command key, it even used to have an apple logo on it. and i thought it was microsoft that created the windows key because it wanted its own key like apple had.

wouldn't you also map the windows key to command when you used such a keyboard on a mac?

Is this where I can complain about command+q? All day every day I use command+tab/tilde/w/a/s, and smack in the middle of that is command q. It's like if automobile manufacturers decided to put a third pedal between the accelerator and the brake that immediately shuts off your car in the middle of the highway. And you can't disable it, instead you can map it to such helpful things like... invert colors.

Wow. 55 images, all carefully prepared and placed, not a single AI-generated. I love the quality of this post. Not to mention, I learned something new and new perspectives.

Apple just seems to be in a rush to launch half-baked features then keeps them in a weird state of stasis for years. The globe/FN key changes the keyboard layout when tapped, which is very useful since I type in multiple languages, but after a few dozen uses it simply... stops functioning. It's been broken for years. The only way I've found to fix it is to open the command line and killall Dock and killall Finder. But then language switching fails again a few more switches later. Not fixing a feature that has a whole key dedicated to it just shows how careless they've become.

Add to this that the Apple IIe had two keys with the Apple logo on them. One just an outline ‘open Apple’ and one a silhouette ‘closed Apple’. These two keys did different things to each other!

As a forced mac user at work (always used windows or Linux) the number of modifier keys is really confusing. On pc you use control almost for anything, alt for very special cases (when usually control is already taken) and the windows/meta key for os-related things. On mac a lot of shortcuts use command, but some use control, and there are a bunch that use option without a real reason why, my memory really suffers from this.

The only common thing between the two is that the fn key is only used for the special modifiers under F1-F12.

I was given a magic keyboard, and my plan was to replace it with a standard one, but then I found about the keys mapping from Karabiner, and the fn key is exactly at the control position...so I started remapping.

Now, I can do almost everything with fn+key. Fn+c=command+c, fn+s=control+s and so on.

The button is now the shortcut for voice dictation.

At the moment, apps like Wisprflow or OpenWhispr are using it as their main shortcut, and I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before Apple integrates it as the default for Siri.

This article covered many historical aspects I was never aware of.

> Suddenly, the globe key on the iPad and the hybrid globe/Fn key on the Mac were equipped with a million Windows-like tasks

It seems like Apple has been in a bind to make the iPad a better Mac and the Mac a better iPad while at the same time insisting that the iPad is its own device with its own purpose and that the Mac is its own device with its own purpose. IIRC, it took a long time to bring a keyboard and mouse to the iPad. Despite Apple’s repeated claims that it doesn’t see value in a touchscreen Mac, rumors point to one being launched next year (albeit with limitations).

Apple used to be good at cannibalizing its own product lines. But now it seems stuck with the desire to sell more iPads and more Macs without one cannibalizing or destroying another.

Looking at this IBM pc keyboard image in this article, where all the function keys are on the left, it makes sense that Alt+F4 and other similar shortcut on Windows made sense at that time, but these days function keys being at top row make such keyboard shortcuts unergonomic.

I was born in the Mac era, but when they still printed the Apple glyph on the Command key. Therefore, I still call it the "Apple key."

I also took inspiration from ChromeOS's replacement of Caps with Search (and a popular article from that era about the history of the hyper key), and rebound Caps to be Escape. I hardly ever use the actual escape key (which is handy on a 60 key board, because they that's just the `/~ key).

Escape (Caps) by itself is Escape. Esc+A is opens the search (goto file/line/etc. in a text editor). Esc+S is the Command Palette in apps that have one.

Very handy to be able to chord keys right next to each other!

> Most importantly for our conversation, the Fn key was resolved internally inside the keyboard

That's the worst part about Fn, limiting user customization and wasting keyboard space. Good that this was partially dialed back, but bad that Apple added another exclusivity barrier breaking external keyboards.

> What if Apple at some point decides that Esc means something, and you already used it for something else?

You continue to use it for something else? How is it different from any other default shortcut you don't like and change?

> It’s just a modifier key.

That should be the end game! No lock in, no weird limitations like "cannot map Mission Control to ↑"

There is no hope for Apple to make anything good out of it (⌃⌘X is their peak ergonomic design), but at least you'd be able to freely use the key yourself

> Most crucially, both keyboards introduced a new tenant: Control (⌃). This was modifier key number four, and to this day, I don’t fully understand why ⌘ wasn’t repurposed here

Because then we would have ended up with the same mess that is Windows (and Linux for that matter) when it comes to ^C being ambiguous...

Yeah my least favorite key since the globe was added. Randomly opens emoji keyboard on me

For the Linux crowd what's your custom mapping?

For me its capslock as ctrl, super (windows key) for window management, altgr for layers, right side ctrl as compose key.

I never noticed the Globe before, and now I know why the emoji keyboard sometimes pops up.

Huge enabler for the mini keyboards for me: Fn + L/R for Home/End, Fn + U/D for PgUp/PgDn.

I love my Fn/Globe key. It fires up Aqua Voice and begins transcribing. My fingers appreciate the break from typing.

Any Mac with the globe on the key is Apple Silicon.

I'm so fucking tired of trying to do a super spock pinch with my keyboard. I've always thought composition of typing various keys in sequence is better than trying to press 4 keys at once, particularly if your left handed or right handed, say.

There were "compose" keys that let you type characters to combine other characters -- (not ai) but they weren't forcing the person to super spock pinch the keyboard to get the character they wanted. It was "compose" then "c" then "s" to get the "ç" character.

I honestly would like to be able to do the same thing with ctrl-alt-x, eg. where ctrl alt and x are separate key presses.

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Keyboard shortcuts are truly a mess on mac os. Windows does it much better and with more consistency. That results in third party apps also having sensible shortcuts. Example: Ctrl+G is widely used in code editors for "Goto line". On Windows it makes perfect sense to use because Ctrl+ shortcuts are used for text editing everywhere. But on macos it is out of place, because there Cmd+ is the standard for text editing. But Cmd+G is used for some obscure find feature. So editors fall back to Ctrl+G which is out of place.

While this is a problem for the default user experience, I think if you're an enthusiast there's less of a problem because you can get an external keyboard you like.

Laptop keyboards will always be disliked by someone: the standard keyboard layout is awful, and dealing with this either involves trying to stick to the conventional design (wherein different people will dislike different changes); whereas a good keyboard design is going to be so far from the standard keyboard that laptops aren't going to do that.

(People will quibble about where to put the arrow keys or however many modifier keys there are or that caps lock is badly placed.. but the most glaring issue is that the spacebar doesn't need to be over 6x the size of other keys).

It's a problem if the OS is inconsistent/unclear about what scan codes are required to do things.