> 11 points by speckx 13 minutes ago | flag | hide | 1 comment
this is currently #1 on HN gaining 11 points in 13 mins. never seen this before.
One of the many cases where physical buttons/switches are superior to software-only options.
The lengths that peripheral manufacturers will go to to create "functionality" is wild, having looked at hardware like this for the first time. Granted, I'm working with what is widely considered an accessibility HID, the fact that "stickey keys" (as theyre known in Windows) is a default function of this keyboard, which breaks all common passive PS/2 -> USB adapters due to encoding differences, significantly fucks up my workflow in using it with modern hardware by using unique encodings AFAICT. It's a wonderful puzzle, but an annoyance for someone trying to accomplish anything.
I'm confident this shit could be oneshot with LLMs, but that's not the point of the work, in case anyone was considering chiming in about them.
Part of me needs to realize that this was made 30+ years ago, before we knew what we now know. But another part of me feels intense animosity for such early, unabashed, and shameless abandon in regards to HID standards/protocols. Using what is effectively Stickey Keys by default and breaking PS/2 -> USB adaptability because of that is annoying as hell, even if the thing is $50 on ebay.
It's only natural on the actual display itself.
Anothe affront to nature by Apple, along with killing the headphone jack.
Disabling natural scrolling used to be the first thing I did on a new system. Until I once was too lazy to do it, got used to it, and now I can’t imagine ever going back.
But then two years ago I got a desktop computer with an external mouse again and.... natural scrolling doesn't work for me on a physical wheel. With a trackpad, the metaphor is direct, that the page or document is being moved by the motion of your fingers; but with a wheel, I still want to pull it toward me to scroll down, because the feels like rolling the little wheel along the document, or turning it to advance the document like a printer finishing a page.
Maybe that's all silly, but for me it's natural scrolling on trackpads and conventional scrolling on mice with scrollwheels.
No it isn't.
Both examples match perfectly physically:
- Touchpad is like dragging the piece of paper directly.
- Scroll wheel is like having the paper on the other side of the wheel.
The benefits of this approach, to my knowledge and estimation, include: no waiting for a slider to appear; no nested actions; no need to read the current value; each click does not depend on the current state; Fitts’ Law muscle memory boost (the buttons are effectively infinite-height targets); discoverability compared to scrollwheelable icons.
You can configure whether you prefer the standard behavior or to use the actions assigned to the F keys by default, I think in the BIOS, and then you can use fn lock to switch at runtime. That's nice in itself but that's not all.
In the latter mode, holding a modifier key like Alt makes the F key act standard, so Alt+F4 works in any mode as expected.
I've always hated stateful control. Always ripped out caps lock key from my boards (or later figured out remapping), same for insert mode
That's carried over, even with options like one shot mods, & cutting down to under 40 keys (& playing with 28, yesterday received a https://github.com/kilipan/zilpzalp), I still don't find stateful control necessary. More layers, combos, & tap-hold go far
For my part, in emacs I would often try ctrl-x-s to save, but miss the x. When I repeat the attempt, emacs register the complete but unknown key sequence ctrl-s-x followed by the start of a new key sequence with ctrl-s. I consider this similarly stateful because the behavior of "ctrl-s" changes entirely depending on what keystroke (if any) preceded it.
I do it at the software level (Linux / Xorg): complete remapping, with an "hyper" key modifier etc.
The reason I do it at the software level is that you can pry my Topre switches from my cold dead hands and the HHKB Pro JP I'm using doesn't have, by default, a programmable controller. Now I know some people mod their Topre keyboards to add a programmable controller but I never got to that point.
Doing so in hardware using .xkb files is... Something. I know way more about .xkb files than I should but, thankfully, so far I've just been able to brink my .xkb file to every new Linux version (supporting Xorg, I'm not on Wayland).
I take at some point I'll look more into how to mod my HHKB keyboards with programmable controller.
I know it's not an option for certain keyboards (and laptop keyboards) but I appreciated not having to use Fn keys and use physical volume dials like Das Keyboard 4. https://www.daskeyboard.com/daskeyboard-4-professional
More curious.. are there people that use the caps lock key? Its great real-estate…
The fundamental problems here are the product design pushes to make everything smaller and also to add gimmicky features that seem like they'd be useful but with the constraints just end up taking something else away - note that the examples of good keyboards are made from standard full size keycaps. The rise of bespoke keyboard designers that using off the shelf switches/keycaps is a constraint that pushes away the other two trends.
I'd think you can get mechanical keyboards with reasonable wireless functionality these days. If the range isn't long enough, run an active USB extension cord around the room and put the receiver under your couch. Laptops are of course the age-old space where keyboards are scrutinized to death.
When holding Alt, the F4 key always acts as that rather than its special action (backlight brightness down).
enjoy
I have a keyboard here with a handful of extra keys at the top which do all these functions that the author is showing as Fn functions on their keyboard. Isn't that simply the right option?
Also on laptops: yes, I want to change the brightness regularly, but also I use the function keys in applications that support them. There's already like 100 keys on there! How much do the extra ones cost? I don't buy the cheapest laptops anyway, I'll buy what I think will work the best. No manufacturer offers this option though. Even Framework has only half-height escape and function keys shared with Fn triggers :(
Back in 2000s, there were some popular cheap external keyboards with three extra buttons between the delete/end/pgdown row, and the arrows.
The first of those buttons was "power off" sitting just below "Delete".
Example: https://www.flickr.com/photos/hendry/330827330
It was pure madness because it was guaranteed to push this button by accident on a daily basis.
I can't imagine someone using computers for more than 5 minutes could have designed this.
Granted, you'll lose these functions, and likely switching to another keyboard will drive you mad, but I guess this is a good stopgap software based solution.
But the only time I need to use them is… what is it, ctrl-alt-F3 to switch to a console if my window manager has fallen apart. This is a very rare event, so I can’t find any strong feeling here.
What do people use these keys for? The volume/brightness keys seem much more useful. Maybe I’ll map the corresponding F-keys to brightness as well, so I can just never care about Fn.
F2 is the canonical key for renaming
F5 is refresh
F11 is fullscreen
F1 is for help but admittedly I don't use that a lot
I can't think of a very frequent, standard use for the other keys. So I can't really disagree with having so many F keys being kinda unnecessary. But I'm happy to have them and they never bothered me.
Anecdotally, I switched from `ctrl+shift+i` to F12 for opening the web inspector due to many websites capturing that keybinding for their own purpose (claude and code editors) if I didn't have a function row I'd have to find an even more arcane hotkey.
They're just a nice set of purpose-undefined keys that you or the application can bind to useful functions.
Products like Tactus or Tanvas were going in the right direction.
Yes, it’s less direct than touching the screen, but it makes more sense for the model of UI they’ve been going for over the last 20 years where the content of the window is more meaningful than the window itself, which is to say worrying about where the scroll bars are rather than what part of the document you’re looking at is what’s not natural.
Surely if that's the case then when you move your finger to the upper left then the pointer should move to the bottom right. Because that's how it would work if it was a real object and you were pushing the pointer around with your finger. Why is scrolling a special case?
Honestly though, I wouldn't mind that much if Apple hadn't decided to call it "natural" scrolling, like you're weird if you prefer up for scroll up and down for scroll down. It's both smug and reeks of the same kinda of discriminatory attitude that made life hard for left handers.
There are some other alternatives like BetterTouchTool if you want some other changes like gestures, but as far as this specific problem goes you can just `brew install scroll-reverser`, set up the settings you want and forget about it. Life is too short to deal with this nonsense which is clearly designed to sell the Magic Mouse.
I did remap my heaviest hitters a long time ago to single strokes, though. Most notably, start macro, end macro, and replay macro all got coveted non-modal shortcuts.
You want some real fun, try the Microsoft Surface keyboard. Maybe they've fixed in a very recent version, but given how long the product line has had this problem, probably not. It has a stateful Fn key. That's right, a Fn key that works like capslock. There is no conceivable way this is a good idea. It means that if you actually want to use both "sides" of the Fn'd keys, you literally can not build muscle memory. If you hold the Fn key and press one of those keys, it'll do the "other" function, but if you just tap the Fn key, including because you had meant to press one of the keys but decided not to halfway through (which happens all the time, you just don't normally notice it because it's a completely normal thing to do that normally carries no consequences), you flip the polarity of the entire Fn key set. Now a normal press and a Fn-press do the opposite things. Until you flip it again.
This is not a "oh, as a multi-decade key user I have opinions about whether key strokes should be 68dB or 72dB" question. This is basic functioning of the keyboard. It's insane.
And, naturally, the key is "magic" and the OS can't see it. While I'm bitching, what is the deal with keyboards on new laptops needing special drivers? What the fuck is so special about your keyboard that you need drivers for it? I'll tell you what's so special about it: stuff you shouldn't be doing anyhow. My OS should be able to see and address all keys so I can remap them as needed. Your stupid special key that does your stupid special thing doesn't need to be a stupid special key. Make it a normal key and trigger your behavior in Windows, not in the hardware. Then I can use your stupid special key at least as a Meta or a Hyper or something. You don't need special drivers to have normal keys, you only need special drivers if you're doing something stupid.
So there's no fixing the Fn key on these systems because it's one of the magic keys that can't be seen by the OS at all, so it can't be remapped, it can't be turned off, it can't be locked into one state, you can't do anything. You're just stuck with a keyboard that, from your brain's point of view, randomly swaps a couple of dozen keys around.
Now I'm also on a programmable keyboard. This guy, to be precise: https://mistelkeyboard.com/products/0a26d32ac1e3b1d2af2896e0... which I split across my chair so I've got one half under each hand when it is resting comfortably. That's something you can't get a laptop keyboard to do.
The shortcut for toggling fullscreen in Firefox is F11.
Many default shortcuts in JetBrains IDEs also use function keys. The keymap can be changed, of course, so you can design your own keymap to avoid F keys, but that's still a bit of a chore.
kgwxd•1h ago
I used to work on 3 different laptops, so I kind of got used to thinking about every stroke using those keys, but I never want to go back there, it's so mentally taxing.
zf00002•47m ago