I never understood people complaining about "ATM machine": I mean, I get it. Everybody knows what an ATM is and we know it's a machine, so it is redundant.
But if I didn't have a japanese keyboard and family living in Japan since 30 years, I wouldn't necessarily know what:
"There was also the JIS keyboard"
would refer to.
While: "There was also the japanese JIS standard keyboard" is crystal clear.
Even if, technically, it's quite redundant.
Another pet peeve of mine: I hate it when articles are full of acronyms without at least the acronym being explained the first time it's used in TFA (The Fucking Article).
At times there are TFAs posted here with so many acronyms that you get comments saying: "I don't know what most of these acronyms mean".
And I regularly have to cut/paste sentences into Gemini and ask it: "Explain the acronyms".
So, even if it's a bit funny, please more "japanese JIS standard". Much more.
> I gonna be generous and guess this was upvoted as top post for being maybe possibly midwit-correct, hoho you are so right good sire, reddit-fedora-tip herpdy-derp.
You may want to look in a mirror. Your snide tone does not add anything here.
No amount of drooling over Apple keyboards will make me forget that Apple's designers didn't add keys for basic functions such as Copy and Paste, Undo and Redo.
I don't see a clear advantage over the the ZXCV shortcut placement which the Macintosh team chose. (The original Finder had no specific Redo shortcut because it was single-undo and ⌘-Z performed both undo and redo.) Even well-placed dedicated keys on a Xerox-style (or later Sun-style) "fun cluster" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBiWtJJN5zk to the left of the alphabetic cluster would have forced the hand to move further away from the home row. Of course ZXCV is much less well-adapted to the left-handed, but that would probably be true of any dedicated keys as well, unless they were mirrored on both sides of the keyboard.
> […] left of the alphabetic cluster would have forced the hand to move further away from the home row.
The Star left cluster are primarily operations that pair the left hand on the keys with the right hand on the mouse. This derives from Engelbart's Mother of All Demos with the left-side keyset paired with the right-side mouse.
> The Star left cluster are primarily operations that pair the left hand on the keys with the right hand on the mouse.
Sure (this is demonstrated in the linked video, for instance) but the ZXCV group is pretty similar in that respect. Even for operations which involve the mouse it's preferable to drag only one hand far away from its home position, rather than both of them. (Especially since the video evidence https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q seems to suggest that Star users tended to move their left hand only after making the mouse selection, instead of prepositioning it.) And the Star's Undo key, which presumably doesn't require help from mouse input and is likely to be needed after a non-mouse action, isn't placed any more conveniently near the home row: it's simply in the right side-cluster rather than the left one.
(Yes, they could have just replaced the "regular" function keys with copy/paste keys, but I feel like that would have gone over about as well as the various times they've, uh, tried to replace the function keys)
Early Mac design was excellent overall, but decided not to include these keys (maybe they were leaning towards Smalltalk-like context menus?), and then seemed to go into more cryptic and power-user in-the-know keyboard direction (like with the 3-icon key including special support for flipping burgers):
At least we get cmd and control as separate keys still, which makes copy/paste/… in a terminal a breeze, without either needing to sacrifice terminal control keys, or remember to use different c/p sequences in different scenarios.
I work primarily on Macs, but also have Windows machines on my desk. Switching to Windows, I always have to pause and think, "Wait… I'm supposed to press what to copy again?"
Conflating meta keys with control keys is one of the more pernicious abominations Microsoft saddled on the tech world.
Shift - Control - Meta - Super - Hyper. Each has its place.
Don't forget the Terminal key, so you can summon the elevator with Terminal-E and buzz open the door in the elevator lobby with Terminal-D, all without getting up out of your chair in front of your Lisp Machine.
Double bucky, you're the one!
You make my keyboard lots of fun
Double bucky, an additional bit or two:
(Vo-vo-de-o!)
Control and Meta side by side,
Augmented ASCII, nine bits wide!
Double bucky, a half a thousand glyphs,
plus a few!
Oh,
I sure wish that I
Had a couple of
bits more!
Perhaps a
Set of pedals to
Make the number of
Bits four:
Double double bucky!
Double bucky, left and right
OR'd together, outta sight!
Double bucky, I'd like a whole word of
Double bucky, I'm happy I heard of
Double bucky, I'd like a whole
word of you!
(For those of you who are interested, the term "bucky bits" comes from Niklaus Wirth, known as "bucky" to friends, who suggested that an extra bit be added to terminal codes on 36 bit machines for use by screen editors.)
The UniPress Emacs icon was a unicorn, because after you held down all the modifier keys with both hands, you need a horn on your head to press the actual letter.
So "Uni[Corn Key]Press Emacs".
You can see it in the lower left corner of this screen snapshot, but the horn is covered by a tabbed emacs window:
They didn't leave the functions out. They left the words off the keys and put the functions on Command-ZXCV, which you only know if someone already told you. The Extended Keyboard later printed Cut/Copy/Paste under F2-F4, or shipped a plastic overlay. That is a confession, not a design.
Xerox Star put labeled keys in a left-hand cluster meant to work with the mouse in the other hand, which is the Engelbart pairing. Apple chose not to. Printing Copy on C would have been the cheap half of that lesson.
The missing keycaps are still the small complaint. The theft was the words.
>Consider the "clipboard" on the Mac, PC or XWindows. It's just like a regular clipboard, except (a) you can't see it, (b) it holds only one object, (c) whatever you put there destroys the previous contents. Aside from that, IT'S JUST LIKE A REGULAR CLIPBOARD IN EVERY OTHER RESPECT-- EXCEPT THERE AREN'T ANY OTHER RESPECTS!
>I see this pseudo-clipboard as stupidity at its height: a really terrible, destructive mechanism, excused by a word that makes it sound somehow okay. It is a further offense-- the greatest atrocity in the computer field, I believe-- that the crippled and destructive functions of this pseudo-clipboard have been falsely given the names "cut" and "paste"-- which for decades have meant something ENTIRELY different to writers, the function of parallel rearrangement with all things visible.
He said it again at BayCHI in 2021. YouTube's auto-captions turned one line into "many signs sound okay." I wrote him. He did not argue with the sense of the passage. He did correct one attribution: "long form work" is Tesler's phrase, from their emails, not Ted's. Cleaned transcript of the public talk (intent, not a court reporter):
Copy of HCI Constructs Then and Now with Ted Nelson:
>So what does cut and paste mean today? Those holy words, referring to the highest faculties of an author's overview, have been assigned to a strange construct called the clipboard: an invisible buffer. You can't see it, and it holds only one object. In other respects it is like a physical clipboard, except there aren't any other respects.
>So cut and paste -- those formerly sacred words for the mind's highest faculty -- have been used to propagandize this abominable construct. These features should have been called hide and plug, but somehow using those familiar old words makes them sound okay, like the words "national socialism." So they could at least have made it visible and made it a stack for rearrangement. But oh no.
>Now this crime against humanity -- calling the hide-and-plug functions cut and paste -- was perpetrated by a good friend of mine, the late Larry Tesler. And he kept insisting to me -- we had many emails on the subject -- that the real cut and paste was only for very specialist long-form work.
NY Times copy boy (1960s): First morning task — scrape dried paste from glass pots, refill with wet library paste (three on city desk, foreign, economics). Reporters cut sections, paste down, rewrite between. Yell copy → pneumatic tube to typesetting. "This was called cut and paste and indeed it was."
Grandmother's Tolstoy story: Daughter's lecture — Tolstoy dictates two longhand copies; one filed, one cut up all over the dacha floor; walking in woods: "Don't touch my noodles"; returns to paste in new order and dictate next draft.
Slide (Ted Selker showed): Ted's 1965 ACM article noodles — bad reproduction of actual cutting/pasting with photo of real noodles.
A keycap that says Paste would still be hide-and-plug. It would just confess on the plastic. What writers meant was noodles on the table, everything visible, rearrange, then paste. Ted still does that with scissors.
>The terms "cut" and "paste" were redefined in 1984, when the Macintosh came out-- "cut" now meant HIDE and "paste" meant PLUG-- and as a result, there are no decent tools for large-scale rearrangement.
>Tolstoy cut his manuscripts into pieces that he called his "noodles"-- then he would rearrange them and paste them into a new order, adding text and crossing out, then dictating a new draft to his daughters, one to be cut up again. (My grandmother heard this in a lecture by one of his daughters.)
>Balzac wore a knife around his neck for cutting up his manuscripts-- but such rearrangement is impossible with today's computer software.
>Personally, in the 1960s I had huge paper cut at the factory-- about 14" wide by 40" long-- for massive rearrangement by REAL cutting and pasting of big manuscripts. I still have some of that big paper.
>This shows the actual cut and paste process, done physically, that has been denied to us by software since those two words were redefined in 1984 to mean "hide" (on the invisible hideyhole called misleadingly the "clipboard") and "plug" (whatever's in the invisible hideyhole) to wherever you're pointing.
>Or since the letters used on both Mac and Windows are C and V, they could better have stood for Cram and Vomit.
Ted Nelson — invisible clipboard rant (source catalog):
Aaaah, he's got carriage return and enter mixed up. The whole reason for the symbol being an arrow returning to the beginning of the line, is because it's the return key. I love the Canadian enter symbol, an arrow pointing into a box.
No. He calls the big one Enter presumably in recognition that’s what people know it as (check how any cross-platform web app calls it), and the numpad one Return/Enter because that’s what it is collectively known as across all the platforms. This all makes sense to me. Since the keys on the photos don’t have labels, this feels better for a reader in 2026 than being overly pedantic.
Right, but if you're referring to Return as Enter, then there's no reason to refer to Enter as Return. The reason for the change is that people don't distinguish the two. If we're going to eliminate this distinction, we should do it properly!
(I've had blank looks from a few colleagues after suggesting they press the Return key (that being the term I used to refer to the Return key) - which makes me wonder what percentage of people even know that Return is the name of a key. Perhaps we should retire the term entirely.)
How would that work for all the software that distinguishes between them? The standard (see e.g. Mathematica) is for `return` to create a new line in a multi-line text field, and `enter` (`fn+return` on a keyboard without a dedicated key) to execute/evaluate/commit the field.
But Return and Enter are still functionally different keys on macOS. Return inserts a new line, Enter (and cmd-Return) submits forms (which works for Reddit comments, but not here for some reason).
AFAIK those are not different keys, it's the literal keyboard combination Cmd+Return that is interpreted as submission in those contexts. Ctrl often works just as well on Windows for that purpose as well.
Numpad Enter is definitely a distinct key though, but I've never seen it treated differently than Return (except for randomly not working in some contexts that accept Return)
Except in many apps Return submits forms and Shift+Return inserts a new line, and in many other places Return and Enter do the same thing, showing to me that those labels are already pretty meaningless. It feels like a transition a good design team could figure out, keeping the distinction for those who want it, but simplifying for the rest. I believe Windows calls these Enter and Numpad Enter, or something like that? That feels better to me.
I think back in the day (say the late 80s) it became apparent to those in charge that this new IT thing was going to be very important in the workplace, and that it was going to be important to train up people to operate computers.
Given those in charge were probably one finger typists if that, and befuddled by technology, they would collectively have decided that computers should be standardised so that learnt skills would be transferrable, and therefore they probably imposed ideas like standardised keyboard layouts.
Of course it turned out that the next generation were totally capable of operating computers without any formal training, were totally fine with different operating systems, different keyboard layouts, different applications etc, and so there was probably lots of wasted effort solving a non-existent problem.
On the JIS 2003 model, the more traditional Control position is great (it’s how I map my boards) but the Caps Lock positioning is really good too and makes so much sense with how infrequently it’s used. Very little risk of accidentally hitting it. I wonder why more boards haven’t adopted it.
I'm wondering where those Canadian keyboards are used. I live in Canada, have seen plenty of multilingual keyboards, and have seen those symbols perhaps once. Even so I can't be sure it was on a keyboard. I just recognized one of the symbols.
Somewhat related: I live in France but have learnt computing on a QWERTY US keyboard back in the days, not AZERTY. As a result the only keyboard layout I can use without losing my sanity is a QWERTY US MacBook with a Canadian layout - I have my Q right where I want it, Enter key is lined up in the middle row, # $ % * are there for coding, and all the accents é è à ^ ç are there too. Thank you, Canada.
I bought my MBP in Québec, with the default keyboard they stock.
https://f.toi.sh/fr-ca-mbp.jpg (Pardon the dust!! You never really look too closely as your keyboard until you have to take a picture of it eh?)
Tab, capslock, shift, backspace, and return are all symbols-only. I feel like I have a pretty good ambient understanding of what they mean at a glance so I think I've always seen them on fr-CA layouts I've used.
Was trying to communicate to a designer in Ontario a while ago that we could use the backspace symbol for a correction key in a PIN entry view. We were working on an iOS application so I was immediately thinking that the apple default UI font would have exactly that "chevron with a cross" symbol styled how it looks on the keyboard somewhere in it. Designer was pretty confused about it though, so I think it's probably just fr-CA keyboards.
I don't think I've seen a French-Canadian keyboard before, that is so much less cursed than the AZERTY monstrosity I have from France (hold shift to type numbers! hold shift to type period and comma!)
I worked at the provincial government as an intern. We had those keyboards.
I'm willing to bet that more than 99% of the Canadian Multilingual CSA keyboards on PCs are used by public servants. There is another (French Canadian)layout that is much more common among consumers.
Of course, the Mac side is different, having somehow chosen to align with the (IMO superior) CSA layout.
> I worked at the provincial government as an intern. We had those keyboards.
Which province? Because I've never seen the CSA keyboard used here in Alberta, but it's also not terribly surprising that the Albertan government has poor support for French.
Perhaps, but I really don't know why a French keyboard would be different in Quebec compared to a French keyboard in the rest of Canada. There is a picture of a MacBook keyboard from another poster in this thread, which is what I would expect.
Probably the stores in english canada mostly just sell english keyboards (after all you can change the keymapping in OS). Maybe it would be different in a city that is 50-50, but if you are in a city that is 90-10 english, probably not a lot of people are stocking french keyboards.
I have picked up a couple laptops with French Canadian layouts over the years and have encountered said layouts in French immersion schools, so I'm no stranger to them. That said, I'm not a French speaker, so I never looked into variations.
From a visual perspective I miss some of those more esoteric symbols, but the current Apple (US) keyboard gets it right. Symbols with text labels for modifiers and clear pictographs for the function keys (though the F3/Mission Control icon is a bit unclear until you click i and the behavior of F5/mic seems unhelpful). I just remember a few too many family tech support issues trying to help a struggling relative understand that command and 'open apple' are the same thing.
The Canadian keyboards are so Canada: supposed to appeal to either English or French users, but just pisses them off. English speakers go for the US layout, and French speakers go for a European layout.
I remember some of our early Chromebooks had Canadian keyboards, and students and teachers revolted.
Every I know in Montreal uses the CSA/ACNOR layout if they're writing French and nobody uses AZERTY (unless you've recently arrived from France, of which many folks here have).
We were all taught to use keyboards printed in the US keyboard, but swapping the virtual layout to Canadian French when writing French, which is what I still do.
> Every I know in Montreal uses the CSA/ACNOR layout if they're writing French and nobody uses AZERTY
There are two different Canadian QWERTY keyboard layouts suited for typing French though: the one called "Canadian French" (or something similar) where most of the accents are on dead keys [0], or the one called "Canadian Multilingual Standard" (or "CSA" or "ACNOR") where most of the accented letters have dedicated keys [1].
I personally use the CSA layout, but my impression was that that's uncommon, since my French teacher thought that I was crazy when I told her I used that layout. And this comment [2] suggests something similar. But I also live in Alberta, so I'm not exactly in the best location to see what most French Canadians use :)
> We were all taught to use keyboards printed in the US keyboard, but swapping the virtual layout to Canadian French when writing French
Same here, but I had assumed that that was only because I was in Alberta where there aren't many French people/keyboards.
oh you're totally right I've used the "Canadian Multilingual Standard" before by accident and it was brutal, the "Canadian French" one is the one I use and was taught to use. I confused the two (I took a quick look at the layout on wiki and it looked sorta similar, but it's not).
I always find icons better than text, given that you don't know the exact linguistic background of the user. Thus for me the Canadian keyboard makes more sense than everything. I think the latest keyboards from Apple also go this direction, exchanging text for icons.
ASCII is, as people have pointed out, a 7-bit code, so it can hold only 128 characters. When they added _ and ^ to it in 01967, they had to remove the ← and ↑ characters from ASCII-1963⁂. So there was no space for any of the characters —–“”×÷£°†‡¢§•€, which are absolutely critical even for English. "National variants" of ASCII might allocate space to some of them, or to other characters like ñ which are even more critical to the languages that use them.
⁂ Smalltalk's continued use of ASCII-1963, among other things so that it could use ← as the assignment operator, is the reason that OO programmers got in the habit of using CamelCase, and are still doing so today, despite using a character set containing the underscore, and, typically, programming languages in which underscores are valid characters
> —–“”×÷£°†‡¢§•€, which are absolutely critical even for English
Assuming that second dash is an en-dash, I've not used the majority of those characters even when handwriting. I would say the quotes I handwrite are closer to symmetrical " quotes, I do still use the multiply but I use a slash for divide, I do use the pound symbol and degree symbol, and I've never used the rest. And I'm from england
ASCII is a 7-bit code, so there are only so many symbols one can add. Prior to ASCII, you had codes that used as few as 5 bits. Early C had the option to use digraphs to represent various forms of parenthesis, simply because symbols like {} and [] were not universal.
(Strictly speaking, people did continue adding symbols. We used to talk about code pages: when the MSB was 0, the other 7 bits were ASCII. When the MSB was 1, the other 7 bits were a user selected code pade.)
Many European layouts do have more symbols outside ASCII. For example German has ° (degree) and ß (ess-tset) and § (paragraph).
German PC keyboards also tend to have µ on the M key, but it is available with the right Alt key.
Macintosh keyboard layouts tend to have many symbols on Option-combinations but they are not always printed.
ASCII is 7-bit and fully filled out. Every other extended character system prior to Unicode was sporadically supported. C has digraphs and trigraphs because even the ASCII punctuation wasn't guaranteed to be available on all keyboards. IBM, notably had an APL typeball for their Selectric derived terminals but that was equivalent to switching character sets and not something that could be considered universal prior to Unicode.
Alt/Opt/⌥ label also depends on age/region/etc, as outlined in the blog post. You can see an example of a key with "Alt" in the second image of the post.
Personally, I'm particularly fond of the "electronic switch" glyph ⌥ used to denote Option, which I first saw in the manual for classic Macintosh app: UltraPaint, 1990 by Deneba Systems, so dated around the beginning of Unicode.
My early aluminium Apple A1243 2171 Wired Keyboard, British layout dated 2007, has it labelled with both Alt and ⌥. (BTW my keyboard is still going strong at 18 years old with only the shift key replaced after I wore it completely through.)
I too thought the 2003 keyboard was the best design, but for ergonomic reasons.
They did it right with respect to key shape.
- the keys were scuplted. This eliminated touch-typing problems because your fingers would find the edges of keys then self-center in the middle of a concave surface.
- the modifier keys were convex, so you could detect them easily
- you could plug the mouse into the keyboard. (though there were power problems with higher-powered mice)
I really hated it when they went to flat keyboards.
Functionality went out the window. You couldn't find the center of keys, so it was easier to make mistakes because of lack of feel.
The only nice thing I could say about them is that they were attractive to look at in a way, and the short throw was very light.
The symbols are from a weird ISO/IEC standard (9995-7 ?) that never really caught on except in a few places. I have seen the lock-key symbols more often on lock light panels than on keycaps.
All this micro-management of these standards only serves to confuse people and ultimately causes entry errors and wastes time. Go find the relevant XKCD comic on your own.
> You turned it sideways. Using a colon, a dash, and a parenthesis character in series, you could make a sideways smile or frown. It looked like this: [happy-face] or [sad-face]
Click on the HN discussion > Click on the article > Notice the weird CMS error > Copy the sentense > Click back > Click back again by mistake(?) > Click on the discussion of the wrong article (?) > Paste the sentence > Notice that HN eat the emoji > Add the version in brackets.
> There was also the Japanese JIS standard keyboard
is a particularly humorous instance of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAS_syndrome
I never understood people complaining about "ATM machine": I mean, I get it. Everybody knows what an ATM is and we know it's a machine, so it is redundant.
But if I didn't have a japanese keyboard and family living in Japan since 30 years, I wouldn't necessarily know what:
"There was also the JIS keyboard"
would refer to.
While: "There was also the japanese JIS standard keyboard" is crystal clear.
Even if, technically, it's quite redundant.
Another pet peeve of mine: I hate it when articles are full of acronyms without at least the acronym being explained the first time it's used in TFA (The Fucking Article).
At times there are TFAs posted here with so many acronyms that you get comments saying: "I don't know what most of these acronyms mean".
And I regularly have to cut/paste sentences into Gemini and ask it: "Explain the acronyms".
So, even if it's a bit funny, please more "japanese JIS standard". Much more.
What I love about DRY is you have to repeat yourself by explaining DRY means "Don't repeat yourself"
I don't think I've ever seen someone do this from both sides of the same abbreviation (eg. Automated ATM Machine) before now, that's quite amusing.
[flagged]
There is no Japan Standard Institute but Japanese Industrial Standards (JIS) and Japanese Industrial Standards Commitee (JISC).
> I gonna be generous and guess this was upvoted as top post for being maybe possibly midwit-correct, hoho you are so right good sire, reddit-fedora-tip herpdy-derp.
You may want to look in a mirror. Your snide tone does not add anything here.
"Japanese Japanese Industrial Standards standard keyboard"
No amount of drooling over Apple keyboards will make me forget that Apple's designers didn't add keys for basic functions such as Copy and Paste, Undo and Redo.
I don't see a clear advantage over the the ZXCV shortcut placement which the Macintosh team chose. (The original Finder had no specific Redo shortcut because it was single-undo and ⌘-Z performed both undo and redo.) Even well-placed dedicated keys on a Xerox-style (or later Sun-style) "fun cluster" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBiWtJJN5zk to the left of the alphabetic cluster would have forced the hand to move further away from the home row. Of course ZXCV is much less well-adapted to the left-handed, but that would probably be true of any dedicated keys as well, unless they were mirrored on both sides of the keyboard.
> […] left of the alphabetic cluster would have forced the hand to move further away from the home row.
The Star left cluster are primarily operations that pair the left hand on the keys with the right hand on the mouse. This derives from Engelbart's Mother of All Demos with the left-side keyset paired with the right-side mouse.
> The Star left cluster are primarily operations that pair the left hand on the keys with the right hand on the mouse.
Sure (this is demonstrated in the linked video, for instance) but the ZXCV group is pretty similar in that respect. Even for operations which involve the mouse it's preferable to drag only one hand far away from its home position, rather than both of them. (Especially since the video evidence https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q seems to suggest that Star users tended to move their left hand only after making the mouse selection, instead of prepositioning it.) And the Star's Undo key, which presumably doesn't require help from mouse input and is likely to be needed after a non-mouse action, isn't placed any more conveniently near the home row: it's simply in the right side-cluster rather than the left one.
The Extended Keyboard II came with a plastic overlay for the function keys. It showed Cut/Copy/Paste for F2/F3/F4 respectively. See https://chrispeak.com/2022/04/08/apple-extended-ii for a photo.
Not sure if this was ever supported system-wide in any way, though.
The Extended Keyboard not-II had the words printed below they keys. https://deskthority.net/wiki/File:Apple_M0115_top.jpg
Now that you're mentioning it, I seem to remember seeing or even owning Extended Keyboard IIs with the same print. I may be wrong, though.
Having seen laptops with dedicated copy/paste/undo/redo keys, I think Apple can be forgiven for not going down the function key rabbit hole: https://pomelo.shockfox.net/pub/img/powerlite.jpg
(Yes, they could have just replaced the "regular" function keys with copy/paste keys, but I feel like that would have gone over about as well as the various times they've, uh, tried to replace the function keys)
The least they could have done was print "Copy", "Paste", etc. on the keys that we now use for those tasks.
Looks like we hugged that poor server to death :-/
It should be back up now! And being managed by the service manager now instead of running in a shell, so it should stay up.
The one and only web host [2] written in Nim [0], running on Sprite [1] ;-)
[0] http://nim-lang.org/
[1] https://github.com/OSPreservProject/sprite/blob/master/sprit...
[2] https://pomelo.shockfox.net/pub/src/httpd.nim
They can't, those keys are too far away for such common operations. And Fn keys are just as bad, so replacing with them would also have been a mistake
And there was already precedent:
https://deskauthority.saberkeebs.com/wiki.themk.org/index.ph...
https://deskthority.net/download/file.php?id=59173
Early Mac design was excellent overall, but decided not to include these keys (maybe they were leaning towards Smalltalk-like context menus?), and then seemed to go into more cryptic and power-user in-the-know keyboard direction (like with the 3-icon key including special support for flipping burgers):
https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/key-symbols-we-lost-to-ti...
At least we get cmd and control as separate keys still, which makes copy/paste/… in a terminal a breeze, without either needing to sacrifice terminal control keys, or remember to use different c/p sequences in different scenarios.
I work primarily on Macs, but also have Windows machines on my desk. Switching to Windows, I always have to pause and think, "Wait… I'm supposed to press what to copy again?"
Conflating meta keys with control keys is one of the more pernicious abominations Microsoft saddled on the tech world.
Shift - Control - Meta - Super - Hyper. Each has its place.
Don't forget the Terminal key, so you can summon the elevator with Terminal-E and buzz open the door in the elevator lobby with Terminal-D, all without getting up out of your chair in front of your Lisp Machine.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40634902
Guy L Steele wrote "Double Bucky" in 1978:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14372023
Double Bucky
(C) 1978 by Guy L. Steele, Jr.
(Sung to the tune of "Rubber Duckie")
(For those of you who are interested, the term "bucky bits" comes from Niklaus Wirth, known as "bucky" to friends, who suggested that an extra bit be added to terminal codes on 36 bit machines for use by screen editors.)The UniPress Emacs icon was a unicorn, because after you held down all the modifier keys with both hands, you need a horn on your head to press the actual letter.
So "Uni[Corn Key]Press Emacs".
You can see it in the lower left corner of this screen snapshot, but the horn is covered by a tabbed emacs window:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#/media/File:Hy...
Sun format Unicorn icon from the UniPress Emacs sources:
https://github.com/SimHacker/NeMACS/blob/main/src/D.sun/unic...
The lack of delete has always annoyed me (and still does). I hate that I have to press fn backspace, or cursor to the end of the word.
You can also use Emacs keys (Ctrl-D) for one-handed delete. Very convenient when Caps Lock is remapped to Control.
The lack of delete has always annoyed me (and still does). I hate that I have to press fn backspace, or cursor to the end of the word.
I bind Delete to F12 on every machine I use. It's a wonderful thing.
They didn't leave the functions out. They left the words off the keys and put the functions on Command-ZXCV, which you only know if someone already told you. The Extended Keyboard later printed Cut/Copy/Paste under F2-F4, or shipped a plastic overlay. That is a confession, not a design.
Xerox Star put labeled keys in a left-hand cluster meant to work with the mouse in the other hand, which is the Engelbart pairing. Apple chose not to. Printing Copy on C would have been the cheap half of that lesson.
The missing keycaps are still the small complaint. The theft was the words.
Ted Nelson, 1999, in his own type:
http://hyperland.com/TedCompOneLiners
>Consider the "clipboard" on the Mac, PC or XWindows. It's just like a regular clipboard, except (a) you can't see it, (b) it holds only one object, (c) whatever you put there destroys the previous contents. Aside from that, IT'S JUST LIKE A REGULAR CLIPBOARD IN EVERY OTHER RESPECT-- EXCEPT THERE AREN'T ANY OTHER RESPECTS!
>I see this pseudo-clipboard as stupidity at its height: a really terrible, destructive mechanism, excused by a word that makes it sound somehow okay. It is a further offense-- the greatest atrocity in the computer field, I believe-- that the crippled and destructive functions of this pseudo-clipboard have been falsely given the names "cut" and "paste"-- which for decades have meant something ENTIRELY different to writers, the function of parallel rearrangement with all things visible.
He said it again at BayCHI in 2021. YouTube's auto-captions turned one line into "many signs sound okay." I wrote him. He did not argue with the sense of the passage. He did correct one attribution: "long form work" is Tesler's phrase, from their emails, not Ted's. Cleaned transcript of the public talk (intent, not a court reporter):
Copy of HCI Constructs Then and Now with Ted Nelson:
https://youtu.be/dOLXLk8TbxQ?t=661
>So what does cut and paste mean today? Those holy words, referring to the highest faculties of an author's overview, have been assigned to a strange construct called the clipboard: an invisible buffer. You can't see it, and it holds only one object. In other respects it is like a physical clipboard, except there aren't any other respects.
>So cut and paste -- those formerly sacred words for the mind's highest faculty -- have been used to propagandize this abominable construct. These features should have been called hide and plug, but somehow using those familiar old words makes them sound okay, like the words "national socialism." So they could at least have made it visible and made it a stack for rearrangement. But oh no.
>Now this crime against humanity -- calling the hide-and-plug functions cut and paste -- was perpetrated by a good friend of mine, the late Larry Tesler. And he kept insisting to me -- we had many emails on the subject -- that the real cut and paste was only for very specialist long-form work.
NY Times copy boy (1960s): First morning task — scrape dried paste from glass pots, refill with wet library paste (three on city desk, foreign, economics). Reporters cut sections, paste down, rewrite between. Yell copy → pneumatic tube to typesetting. "This was called cut and paste and indeed it was."
Grandmother's Tolstoy story: Daughter's lecture — Tolstoy dictates two longhand copies; one filed, one cut up all over the dacha floor; walking in woods: "Don't touch my noodles"; returns to paste in new order and dictate next draft.
Slide (Ted Selker showed): Ted's 1965 ACM article noodles — bad reproduction of actual cutting/pasting with photo of real noodles.
A keycap that says Paste would still be hide-and-plug. It would just confess on the plastic. What writers meant was noodles on the table, everything visible, rearrange, then paste. Ted still does that with scissors.
Real cut and paste-- STILL NEEDED BY WRITERS !
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_35RDA6r3g
>The terms "cut" and "paste" were redefined in 1984, when the Macintosh came out-- "cut" now meant HIDE and "paste" meant PLUG-- and as a result, there are no decent tools for large-scale rearrangement.
>Tolstoy cut his manuscripts into pieces that he called his "noodles"-- then he would rearrange them and paste them into a new order, adding text and crossing out, then dictating a new draft to his daughters, one to be cut up again. (My grandmother heard this in a lecture by one of his daughters.)
>Balzac wore a knife around his neck for cutting up his manuscripts-- but such rearrangement is impossible with today's computer software.
>Personally, in the 1960s I had huge paper cut at the factory-- about 14" wide by 40" long-- for massive rearrangement by REAL cutting and pasting of big manuscripts. I still have some of that big paper.
Cut and Paste, 2014, by Ted Nelson:
https://archive.org/details/cutnpaste_201909
>This shows the actual cut and paste process, done physically, that has been denied to us by software since those two words were redefined in 1984 to mean "hide" (on the invisible hideyhole called misleadingly the "clipboard") and "plug" (whatever's in the invisible hideyhole) to wherever you're pointing.
>Or since the letters used on both Mac and Windows are C and V, they could better have stood for Cram and Vomit.
Ted Nelson — invisible clipboard rant (source catalog):
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...
Aaaah, he's got carriage return and enter mixed up. The whole reason for the symbol being an arrow returning to the beginning of the line, is because it's the return key. I love the Canadian enter symbol, an arrow pointing into a box.
Enter appropriated the same “arrow returning” symbol long ago, and the key is colloquially known more often as Enter these days.
Yes, but he calls the enter key return and the return key enter.
No. He calls the big one Enter presumably in recognition that’s what people know it as (check how any cross-platform web app calls it), and the numpad one Return/Enter because that’s what it is collectively known as across all the platforms. This all makes sense to me. Since the keys on the photos don’t have labels, this feels better for a reader in 2026 than being overly pedantic.
Right, but if you're referring to Return as Enter, then there's no reason to refer to Enter as Return. The reason for the change is that people don't distinguish the two. If we're going to eliminate this distinction, we should do it properly!
(I've had blank looks from a few colleagues after suggesting they press the Return key (that being the term I used to refer to the Return key) - which makes me wonder what percentage of people even know that Return is the name of a key. Perhaps we should retire the term entirely.)
I would love for Apple to move from Return to Enter as the default label, indeed.
How would that work for all the software that distinguishes between them? The standard (see e.g. Mathematica) is for `return` to create a new line in a multi-line text field, and `enter` (`fn+return` on a keyboard without a dedicated key) to execute/evaluate/commit the field.
But Return and Enter are still functionally different keys on macOS. Return inserts a new line, Enter (and cmd-Return) submits forms (which works for Reddit comments, but not here for some reason).
AFAIK those are not different keys, it's the literal keyboard combination Cmd+Return that is interpreted as submission in those contexts. Ctrl often works just as well on Windows for that purpose as well.
Numpad Enter is definitely a distinct key though, but I've never seen it treated differently than Return (except for randomly not working in some contexts that accept Return)
Except in many apps Return submits forms and Shift+Return inserts a new line, and in many other places Return and Enter do the same thing, showing to me that those labels are already pretty meaningless. It feels like a transition a good design team could figure out, keeping the distinction for those who want it, but simplifying for the rest. I believe Windows calls these Enter and Numpad Enter, or something like that? That feels better to me.
I think back in the day (say the late 80s) it became apparent to those in charge that this new IT thing was going to be very important in the workplace, and that it was going to be important to train up people to operate computers.
Given those in charge were probably one finger typists if that, and befuddled by technology, they would collectively have decided that computers should be standardised so that learnt skills would be transferrable, and therefore they probably imposed ideas like standardised keyboard layouts.
Of course it turned out that the next generation were totally capable of operating computers without any formal training, were totally fine with different operating systems, different keyboard layouts, different applications etc, and so there was probably lots of wasted effort solving a non-existent problem.
On the JIS 2003 model, the more traditional Control position is great (it’s how I map my boards) but the Caps Lock positioning is really good too and makes so much sense with how infrequently it’s used. Very little risk of accidentally hitting it. I wonder why more boards haven’t adopted it.
I'm wondering where those Canadian keyboards are used. I live in Canada, have seen plenty of multilingual keyboards, and have seen those symbols perhaps once. Even so I can't be sure it was on a keyboard. I just recognized one of the symbols.
Somewhat related: I live in France but have learnt computing on a QWERTY US keyboard back in the days, not AZERTY. As a result the only keyboard layout I can use without losing my sanity is a QWERTY US MacBook with a Canadian layout - I have my Q right where I want it, Enter key is lined up in the middle row, # $ % * are there for coding, and all the accents é è à ^ ç are there too. Thank you, Canada.
I bought my MBP in Québec, with the default keyboard they stock.
https://f.toi.sh/fr-ca-mbp.jpg (Pardon the dust!! You never really look too closely as your keyboard until you have to take a picture of it eh?)
Tab, capslock, shift, backspace, and return are all symbols-only. I feel like I have a pretty good ambient understanding of what they mean at a glance so I think I've always seen them on fr-CA layouts I've used.
Was trying to communicate to a designer in Ontario a while ago that we could use the backspace symbol for a correction key in a PIN entry view. We were working on an iOS application so I was immediately thinking that the apple default UI font would have exactly that "chevron with a cross" symbol styled how it looks on the keyboard somewhere in it. Designer was pretty confused about it though, so I think it's probably just fr-CA keyboards.
I don't think I've seen a French-Canadian keyboard before, that is so much less cursed than the AZERTY monstrosity I have from France (hold shift to type numbers! hold shift to type period and comma!)
I worked at the provincial government as an intern. We had those keyboards.
I'm willing to bet that more than 99% of the Canadian Multilingual CSA keyboards on PCs are used by public servants. There is another (French Canadian)layout that is much more common among consumers.
Of course, the Mac side is different, having somehow chosen to align with the (IMO superior) CSA layout.
> I worked at the provincial government as an intern. We had those keyboards.
Which province? Because I've never seen the CSA keyboard used here in Alberta, but it's also not terribly surprising that the Albertan government has poor support for French.
In Québec, obviously :D
I suspect its Quebec only
Perhaps, but I really don't know why a French keyboard would be different in Quebec compared to a French keyboard in the rest of Canada. There is a picture of a MacBook keyboard from another poster in this thread, which is what I would expect.
Probably the stores in english canada mostly just sell english keyboards (after all you can change the keymapping in OS). Maybe it would be different in a city that is 50-50, but if you are in a city that is 90-10 english, probably not a lot of people are stocking french keyboards.
I have picked up a couple laptops with French Canadian layouts over the years and have encountered said layouts in French immersion schools, so I'm no stranger to them. That said, I'm not a French speaker, so I never looked into variations.
Québec and federal governments.
From a visual perspective I miss some of those more esoteric symbols, but the current Apple (US) keyboard gets it right. Symbols with text labels for modifiers and clear pictographs for the function keys (though the F3/Mission Control icon is a bit unclear until you click i and the behavior of F5/mic seems unhelpful). I just remember a few too many family tech support issues trying to help a struggling relative understand that command and 'open apple' are the same thing.
The Copy/Paste thing is kinda funny.
If you don't already know Cmd+C and Cmd+V, the keyboard gives you zero clue what they do.
I get why Apple didn't add a bunch of extra keys though. At some point you'd just have a keyboard full of random buttons.
Still, having a real Delete key on a MacBook would be pretty nice lol.
The Canadian keyboards are so Canada: supposed to appeal to either English or French users, but just pisses them off. English speakers go for the US layout, and French speakers go for a European layout.
I remember some of our early Chromebooks had Canadian keyboards, and students and teachers revolted.
Every I know in Montreal uses the CSA/ACNOR layout if they're writing French and nobody uses AZERTY (unless you've recently arrived from France, of which many folks here have).
We were all taught to use keyboards printed in the US keyboard, but swapping the virtual layout to Canadian French when writing French, which is what I still do.
> Every I know in Montreal uses the CSA/ACNOR layout if they're writing French and nobody uses AZERTY
There are two different Canadian QWERTY keyboard layouts suited for typing French though: the one called "Canadian French" (or something similar) where most of the accents are on dead keys [0], or the one called "Canadian Multilingual Standard" (or "CSA" or "ACNOR") where most of the accented letters have dedicated keys [1].
I personally use the CSA layout, but my impression was that that's uncommon, since my French teacher thought that I was crazy when I told her I used that layout. And this comment [2] suggests something similar. But I also live in Alberta, so I'm not exactly in the best location to see what most French Canadians use :)
> We were all taught to use keyboards printed in the US keyboard, but swapping the virtual layout to Canadian French when writing French
Same here, but I had assumed that that was only because I was in Alberta where there aren't many French people/keyboards.
[0]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:KB_Canadian_French.s...
[1]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:KB_Canadian_Multilin...
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49781647
oh you're totally right I've used the "Canadian Multilingual Standard" before by accident and it was brutal, the "Canadian French" one is the one I use and was taught to use. I confused the two (I took a quick look at the layout on wiki and it looked sorta similar, but it's not).
Very nice post, I love computer history and lore and this fits just right!
I would also add ZX Spectrum keyboard with all the keywords on it. G/GOTO, L/LET, P/PRINT etc. Was lots of fun.
We should have engraved common actions on the keys when we could, before every software invented its own set of keyboard shortcuts.
I always find icons better than text, given that you don't know the exact linguistic background of the user. Thus for me the Canadian keyboard makes more sense than everything. I think the latest keyboards from Apple also go this direction, exchanging text for icons.
I wonder why people stopped adding symbols to ASCII. The number row on Macs is just these characters:
And every programming language uses a subset of these. But why these symbols? Why didn't people add more symbols to the keyboard?ASCII is, as people have pointed out, a 7-bit code, so it can hold only 128 characters. When they added _ and ^ to it in 01967, they had to remove the ← and ↑ characters from ASCII-1963⁂. So there was no space for any of the characters —–“”×÷£°†‡¢§•€, which are absolutely critical even for English. "National variants" of ASCII might allocate space to some of them, or to other characters like ñ which are even more critical to the languages that use them.
If you're interested in how ASCII ended up that way, Tom Jennings wrote an excellent history: https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/CharCodeHist/index...
Of course, larger character sets that include ASCII as a subset do keep adding symbols: https://www.unicode.org/alloc/Pipeline.html and some programming languages do use non-ASCII symbols: https://docs.raku.org/language/operators
______
⁂ Smalltalk's continued use of ASCII-1963, among other things so that it could use ← as the assignment operator, is the reason that OO programmers got in the habit of using CamelCase, and are still doing so today, despite using a character set containing the underscore, and, typically, programming languages in which underscores are valid characters
> —–“”×÷£°†‡¢§•€, which are absolutely critical even for English
Assuming that second dash is an en-dash, I've not used the majority of those characters even when handwriting. I would say the quotes I handwrite are closer to symmetrical " quotes, I do still use the multiply but I use a slash for divide, I do use the pound symbol and degree symbol, and I've never used the rest. And I'm from england
A lot of them are typographic in nature rather than manuscript.
I type as well, I still wouldn't call them "absolutely critical"
If you wouldn't call them “absolutely critical” I wouldn't call you a typographer.
ASCII is a 7-bit code, so there are only so many symbols one can add. Prior to ASCII, you had codes that used as few as 5 bits. Early C had the option to use digraphs to represent various forms of parenthesis, simply because symbols like {} and [] were not universal.
(Strictly speaking, people did continue adding symbols. We used to talk about code pages: when the MSB was 0, the other 7 bits were ASCII. When the MSB was 1, the other 7 bits were a user selected code pade.)
Many European layouts do have more symbols outside ASCII. For example German has ° (degree) and ß (ess-tset) and § (paragraph). German PC keyboards also tend to have µ on the M key, but it is available with the right Alt key.
Macintosh keyboard layouts tend to have many symbols on Option-combinations but they are not always printed.
ASCII is 7-bit and fully filled out. Every other extended character system prior to Unicode was sporadically supported. C has digraphs and trigraphs because even the ASCII punctuation wasn't guaranteed to be available on all keyboards. IBM, notably had an APL typeball for their Selectric derived terminals but that was equivalent to switching character sets and not something that could be considered universal prior to Unicode.
>And every programming language uses a subset of these.
You might like https://juliamono.netlify.app/#fnref:zscode
I think the increased use of symbols was because both Europe and Canada are multilingual m, right?
Europe is also a little off here. Different countries use different layouts across Europe.
I enjoyed the post, but it always bothers me when tech people don't know the difference between Return and Enter.
Panic, for example, gets this right. In Transmit, pressing Return connects to a server. Pressing Enter enters rename mode.
2008 song about the Apple key by Hot Lava: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts3tLs6xB1U
Also Alt-J, whose logo Δ can be obtained by pressing alt+j on a Mac:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-J
looking at the mac keyboard im typing on, there is no key called "alt". There is one called option, and pressing opt+k gives me ∆.
Wonder why that changed? (or if it did?)
Alt/Opt/⌥ label also depends on age/region/etc, as outlined in the blog post. You can see an example of a key with "Alt" in the second image of the post.
Personally, I'm particularly fond of the "electronic switch" glyph ⌥ used to denote Option, which I first saw in the manual for classic Macintosh app: UltraPaint, 1990 by Deneba Systems, so dated around the beginning of Unicode.
My early aluminium Apple A1243 2171 Wired Keyboard, British layout dated 2007, has it labelled with both Alt and ⌥. (BTW my keyboard is still going strong at 18 years old with only the shift key replaced after I wore it completely through.)
Interesting. Wonder why its also shifted to opt/alt + k instead of j
Alt+J on my British layout gives ∆ so another regional thing. The band are British, so it figures.
I too thought the 2003 keyboard was the best design, but for ergonomic reasons.
They did it right with respect to key shape.
- the keys were scuplted. This eliminated touch-typing problems because your fingers would find the edges of keys then self-center in the middle of a concave surface.
- the modifier keys were convex, so you could detect them easily
- you could plug the mouse into the keyboard. (though there were power problems with higher-powered mice)
I really hated it when they went to flat keyboards.
Functionality went out the window. You couldn't find the center of keys, so it was easier to make mistakes because of lack of feel.
The only nice thing I could say about them is that they were attractive to look at in a way, and the short throw was very light.
The weird Canadian helm icon on the Control key caught my eye in particular.
The symbols are from a weird ISO/IEC standard (9995-7 ?) that never really caught on except in a few places. I have seen the lock-key symbols more often on lock light panels than on keycaps.
I recall seeing that on typewriters when i was a kid (in the 90s). I dont know if i ever saw it on a computer keyboard.
All this micro-management of these standards only serves to confuse people and ultimately causes entry errors and wastes time. Go find the relevant XKCD comic on your own.
I personally miss the Plato IV Plasma Terminal Keyboard - https://codex.retro1.org/plato:tutor:plato_keyboard and http://xahlee.info/kbd/plato_iv_keyboard.html . Those keys on the right with represented many common functions. But the entire keyboard was designed for a future where computers would facilitate many worlds, not just a replacement for a typewriter or calculator.
> You turned it sideways. Using a colon, a dash, and a parenthesis character in series, you could make a sideways smile or frown. It looked like this: [happy-face] or [sad-face]
Did the editor repace :) with [happy-face]?
??? This isn’t on the linked page.
Wrong thread. The correct one is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49767371
How does that even happen? HN software hiccup? Or what?
Probably my bad.
I guess:
Click on the HN discussion > Click on the article > Notice the weird CMS error > Copy the sentense > Click back > Click back again by mistake(?) > Click on the discussion of the wrong article (?) > Paste the sentence > Notice that HN eat the emoji > Add the version in brackets.
Maybe the author uses a CMS that's supposed to replace tags like [happy-face] with an emoji, but something broke?