Untamed Wilds » keyboard

Ah, now Mac OS X is finally behaving…

Thomas J. Webb — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 07:22:24 +0000

I mentioned in a post earlier about my frustrations w/ the mac keyboard. I finally got around to being frustrated enough to google and (pretty simply) solve the issues I had. Basically, as a programmer the craaaazy way home and end work on mac is unacceptable. The Windows & UNIX way is better (home and end of the line, not the document). Here are the relevant, helpful posts:

http://blog.dubh.org/2007/11/configuring-mac-os-x-terminal.html
http://www.starryhope.com/tech/apple/2006/keyfixer/

Old posts, but very, very helpful. There really should just be a system-wide option, something like “home and end keys operate on line, not document”. Indeed, the primary reason I’m making such a banal post is I hope Apple’s marketing research finds this and maybe does something about making the growing UNIX nerd & programmer user base a lot happier..

One more thing about Mac OS X keyboard suckiness

Thomas J. Webb — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 18:00:01 +0000

…they hijack the F keys. I like having a volume key, etc., but why can’t that be additional keys? F5 is refresh! kuh

Earlier Post:
Mac OS X vs. My Keyboard

Mac OS X vs. My Keyboard

Thomas J. Webb — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 22:17:00 +0000

I like Mac OS X and all, but there’s just one thing that really bugs me about the Mac – Apple’s contempt for the keyboard. I wanted to know if any of you out there know the answer to these problems:

In Windows or Linux, you can hit the end key to go to the end of the line you’re typing or the home to get to the beginning. This neither works on my mac laptop nor my mac mini with a pc-keyboard.
On any other OS, you can hit the tab key while editing a form and the tab not only goes to the text fields, it goes to radio buttons, select boxes, etc. But on Mac, these are skipped right over. Why?! Can I change this? It doesn’t matter what browser I use; I could use the same browser on all platforms with the same problem only on Mac.

These issues waste more time for me than even writing this blog! The keyboard is so fast and I want to bypass Mac’s Mouse-ocracy. As a programmer, these things are particularly frustrating!