stuart78
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.
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DroneBetter
> There was also the Japanese JIS standard keyboardis a
particularly humorous instance of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAS_syndrome
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> applfanboysbgon
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.
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II2II
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.
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> bawolff
I suspect its Quebec only
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Sardtok
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.
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> fasola
Enter appropriated the same "arrow returning" symbol
long ago, and the key is colloquially known more often
as Enter these days.
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amelius
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.
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> spijdar
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)
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> > amelius
The least they could have done was print "Copy",
"Paste", etc. on the keys that we now use for
those tasks.
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> Cockbrand
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.
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> roldie
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.
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xnx
2008 song about the Apple key by Hot Lava:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts3tLs6xB1U
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gus_massa
> 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]?
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> Cockbrand
Maybe the author uses a CMS that's supposed to replace
tags like [happy-face] with an emoji, but something
broke?
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> fasola
??? This isn't on the linked page.
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Cockbrand
The weird Canadian helm icon on the Control key caught my
eye in particular.
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> bawolff
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.
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> Findecanor
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.
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behnamoh
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?
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> Findecanor
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.
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> II2II
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.)
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> kevin_thibedeau
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.
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> applfanboysbgon
ASCII is a 7-bit encoding, so adding more symbols to
it would rather defeat the point.Once you already had
that encoding established, in a time of 8-bit
computing for which it had a practical purpose, it's
historical momentum and inertia from there. Sure, we
have Unicode now, but getting the entire industry to
settle on including a sparkle emoji and a fire emoji
on keyboard layouts is probably not going to happen.
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