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What's the point?
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?
What's the point?
In a word, "emacs".
This really started in the very early 80's.
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.
UNIX people
Short answer: UNIX people like it.
What's the point?
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 Seems like a more robust solution than trial & error of unpublished settings in whatever ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.*.plist file would apply here...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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