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What's the point?
Authored by: aranor on Feb 22, '02 04:07:48PM

Maybe it's just because I don't use a USB keyboard (I'm on a first-gen iBook, so it's ADB, right?), but I just don't see the point of this hack. Why would you want to swap the control and caps lock keys? Can someone shed light on this puzzling question?



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What's the point?
Authored by: macqueen on Feb 22, '02 04:45:29PM

In a word, "emacs".

This is a very widely used editor under Unix, and when using emacs probably around a third of all keystrokes are control keys. Most emacs users want a keyboard with the control key next to the A key for comfortable typing.

Control keys also tend to be used heavily in interactive Unix shell input.



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This really started in the very early 80's.
Authored by: bentley on Feb 22, '02 05:22:51PM

Before the IBM PC 5150 was released in the burgeoning 80's, many, many keyboards on the wide variety of computing systems available at the time, including minis, had the control key where the caps lock typically is today, and the caps lock where the control key typically is today. I think a Hazeltine terminal keyboard had the control key in the lower left corner, and that stuck out because we all hated that.

Then the IBM PC came out with its boat anchor keyboard; the caps lock and the control keys were in new, awful positions. The placement of these keys for the first IBM PC was not arbitrary, it followed the placement of an earlier IBM product (specifically the caps lock key; the control key was an add-on!) but it was not correct. Unfortunately, the standard stuck like glue, and we've been cursed by this configuration for twenty two years. I absolutely dispise the current placement.

It's really bad now that the worlds of Mac and Unix collide in Mac OS X, where some sequences start with the command key, and others start with the control key, the left hand calisthenics are awful.

I haven't dealt with the problem proactively because I deal with a huge number of different keyboards every day; it would do no good for me to solve the problem on some keyboards and not on others.



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UNIX people
Authored by: SeanAhern on Feb 22, '02 09:45:53PM

Short answer: UNIX people like it.

It's more than emacs. When you're using UNIX all the time, you find yourself using things like ^C (kill job), ^U (erase line), ^W (erase word), ^Z (suspend job), and others to do your normal work.

Since I almost never hit Caps Lock, and hit Control all the time, I'd like the Control key to be in an easy-to-access location. Yeah, the lower-left corner isn't bad, but right under my left pinky would be great.

To compound the issue, most people who use UNIX are used to the X11 system, in which you can remap any key to any other key. On every other UNIX computer I've used, I have remapped the Control key to right under my pinky. The Mac is the only computer where I haven't been able to do this.

(I have not tried this hack yet - more precisely, I haven't rebooted yet to see if the changes have taken effect - so I can't comment on its success.)



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What's the point?
Authored by: babbage on Feb 22, '02 10:22:01PM
As MacQueen noted, this is an older & still popular configuration for Unix keyboards. I'm not quite that old school -- I grew up with PCs & Macs and don't remember a time when the current configuration wasn't the norm -- but you still see keyboards like that today, particularly with Sun hardware. Maybe others too, but Sun boxes are the only 'true' Unix machines I've worked on at the console (as opposed to telnetting remotely through a PC of some kind).

Personally, I like having all the modifier keys in a row together on the bottom of the keyboard, and don't have a problem reaching down with my pinky for all the ^foo chords that you have to use in Emacs, Vi, Pine, the shells, etc. But, like many things, it's a religious issue for many people, and in the end the right thing is to just allow the user to override anything that might reasonably need to be overridden.

I've never messed around with it, but what does the Keyboards widget in System Preferences let you override? You can set international keymappings, can't you? If so, can't the 'standard Unix set' [provided that such a thing could be agreed upong ;] be added as an option there? Seems like a more robust solution than trial & error of unpublished settings in whatever ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.*.plist file would apply here...

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