I miss my Home & End keys on my new Mac.

August 9, 2004 4:50 PM

MacSwitchFilter - I'm a long time PC user that just got a Mac. I really really miss my home and end keys! I used to use them constantly! Is there anyway to configure my Mac so that the press of the home key triggers an apple-left arrow event and the press of the end key triggers an apple-right arrow event so I can have my old buddies back?

Bonus question - How do I use the apple modifier vs. the [pound sign thingie?] modifier and likewise for alt vs. option? Also, why does the company that only wants you to use one mouse button complicate your life with 5 different keyboard modifiers?

posted by badstone to computers & internet (48 comments total)

There is the ability in the "Keyboard and Mouse" preference pane to add custom keyboard shortcuts. I'm not sure if that will get you where you want, but...

Not sure what you mean in the bonus question... ah I get it now. The Apple-command key (that is what the pound-sign thingy is) is used for a variety of things, but I'd recommend that you look here for info on what all you can do with them. I use key-combo shortcuts all over the place, in different applications, and once the motor reflex kicks in, it's easy. I do use a three button mouse as well, though.
posted by grimley at 5:22 PM on August 9, 2004

There are just two names for each of those keys. There aren't two different ways to use them.

The command (cloverleaf) symbol has the apple symbol on it, more for historical reasons than anything else. Normally you'd call that the 'command key'. The option key similarly has an "alt" on it for no good reason, just to make PC users feel slightly at home (or slightly confused, depending).

(It's sort of like what the alt key on PCs used to do, except Windows started using the alt key to be more like the Mac's command key, so now it's just a mess...)

I personally think a lot of this baggage should be thrown out, but people get irrationally upset when their familiar key layouts are changed even slightly, so the forces of inertia are large.
posted by xil at 5:24 PM on August 9, 2004

This has nothing to do with your question but I usually tell new switchers about it as it is major in my book. The biggest (and only, really) bad thing about macs vs. pc is this:

Say you have a folder called MUSIC, inside of which are a bunch of band folders.

You have another folder called OTHER MUSIC inside of which there are also band folders (and some of them are the same bands as in the MUSIC folder).

You want all your music in one folder. The MUSIC folder.

On a PC, you'd open the OTHER MUSIC folder and select all the band folders and drag them to the MUSIC folder and your pc would copy or move them all there and ask you if you wanted to replace the dupes.

A similar thing happens on the mac. However, if you answer yes to the mac, it will DELETE the entire contents of the MUSIC band folder in question and replace it with the contents of the OTHER MUSIC band folder with the same name.

Sorry to be so off-topic, but I'd hate for you to learn about this the hard way, like I did.

Most mac users will tell you you're full of shit if you point this out to them. However, they're wrong. I'm right.
posted by dobbs at 5:33 PM on August 9, 2004

You're full of shit, dobbs.
posted by interrobang at 5:36 PM on August 9, 2004

See!
posted by dobbs at 5:49 PM on August 9, 2004

Don't have a home/end answer....

Generally the "command" key was invented to give the computer keyboard "commands". Cut, copy and paste (as well as undo) are very apple.

The cntl key, is mostly a modifier for a mouse. Like a right click. Food for thought - buy a two button mouse, and you don't need to hold down the control key.

These two keys (plus) the "option" key (for optional modifiers of the command key) are used only for keyboard shortcuts.
posted by filmgeek at 5:50 PM on August 9, 2004

uControl is the program you seek.
posted by j.edwards at 6:30 PM on August 9, 2004

I use control-A and control-E to move to the beginning and end of a line, respectively. It's a unix thing.

And grimley is right -- you can add these shortcuts in the system preferences under keyboard/mouse.

As for the modifier keys versus the mouse, just get a two button mouse if you need it, then you have the extra benefit of much better keyboard combos on the Mac.

I don't think it's a strange choice for Apple to rely so heavily on the keyboard -- imagine if they had a single button mouse and the keyboard shortcuts were as much as mess as they are on Windows. Ech.
posted by jragon at 6:34 PM on August 9, 2004

Dobbs, didn't you just explain that both Windows and the Mac OS (OS X, I'm assuming) ask the user if they want to replace the dupes? Mac OS X even gives the user a box to check if all the dupes should be replaced. Otherwise, the alert box cycles through each duplicate file name as you click OK to tell it to replace the dupes. Replace this one? This one? This one? etc. Wouldn't Windows replace the dupes if you clicked Yes, too? I'm not sure I understand your point.
posted by emelenjr at 6:44 PM on August 9, 2004

The discrepancy dobbs is talking about is that Windows will merge the new folder into the old one (replacing duplicate files) while Macs (9 & X) will delete the replaced folder entirely.

So, for example if you had a folder B with a folder C in it, and you replaced a folder B with a folder D in it, on Windows your destination B folder would end up with both C & D subfolders, while on Mac, your destination B folder would have only the C subfolder.

As a Mac-first person, the Windows way of saying 'Replace' when it meant 'Merge' seems odd rather than vice versa, but it's a good warning for Windows switchers. I actually recently got messed up the other way when I tried to upgrade to Eclipse 3 on Windows; it comes as a zipped folder, and when I dragged the new folder to replace the old folder, it left behind a lot of the stuff from Eclipse 2.1 and wouldn't launch as a result.

IIRC, back in the System 7.5 days, there was an extension that added a 'Merge' button next to the 'Replace' button when you copied over something in the finder, which is what I'd like to see in both OSs, truth be told.
posted by boaz at 7:12 PM on August 9, 2004

The control key is a holdover from teletype days. It was used to, obviously, control the remote printer and the connection. CTRL-A was SOH (Start of Heading), CTRL-G was BEL (it rang a bell on the teletype), CTRL-M was Carriage Return (type CTRL-M now, and watch what happens) and so forth.

When ASCII was formulated, it was built as four characters sets. The first set, 00-1F (in hex) was the control characters, the 2nd was symbols and numbers, the third was upper case characters, and the last was lower case.

As we progressed into computer, people realized that we could add more mode keys. If we had "CTRL-A" and "SHIFT-A", we could add, say "BLUE-A" (if you were DEC) or ALT-A, or what not.

When the Mac and Apple III first came out, they had a true space cadet keyboards. You had Shift, Control, Command (the curly symbol), Option, Open Mac (a hollow Apple symbol) and closed Mac. Combined with the 64 characters of the numbers and letters, you had the ability to generate 4096 characters with either a single key or dual key press. Worse, the computer could tell the difference between the right and left shift and control keys.

Then, of course, they figureed out that you didn't need to limit yourself to only hitting *one* mod key. So, we now have things like Ctrl-Alt-Shift-a, or option-command-q. This gave the Apple Keyboard the ability to generate, oh, over 45,000,000,000 different key combinations, and finally made a keyboard that even emacs couldn't overwhelm.

Of course, hitting, crtl-option-command-openapple-closedapple-shift-A was left as an excercise to the typer.
posted by eriko at 7:12 PM on August 9, 2004

hmmm... I thought the keyboard preferences were only for application-specific shortcuts rather than the sort of lower level remapping I want. Unfortunately, I'm at home on my PC (the Mac is at work), so I can't check just now. but, yes j.edwards, uControl looks like exactly the fix I need. i'll try it first thing tomorrow morning. Thanks!

and, re: merge/replace, i'm actually more confused by your example now boaz, but i can just experiment with different junk files and folders and see for myself what happens.
posted by badstone at 7:14 PM on August 9, 2004

dobbs seems to be saying that the preferred behavior is, when you tell the system to replace one set of objects with another, and then confirm explicitly that this is what you really want to do, the system should ignore what you have now told it twice and instead operate according to its own, unarticulated set of rules about what gets replaced and what doesn't.
posted by jjg at 7:16 PM on August 9, 2004

While telling you that it did exactly as you asked. Perfect!
posted by jjg at 7:19 PM on August 9, 2004

A ridiculously trivial nit, but the very first Mac keyboards did not have a control key, just cmd/opt/shift. It's true that they could tell a left key from a right; when Apple eventually released a keyboard with a numeric keypad, the Mac could (and still can, I imagine) also tell keypad numbers from main-keyboard numbers (I used this to great effect in customizing Word 4 shortcuts).
posted by adamrice at 7:21 PM on August 9, 2004

Dobbs, didn't you just explain that both Windows and the Mac OS (OS X, I'm assuming) ask the user if they want to replace the dupes?

No. I'm saying that what you just described is the logical and expected behaviour. However, the Mac doesn't replace the dupes.

Here's what I'm talking about:

I have a folder called TEXT FILES and in that are three text files called one.txt, two.txt, three.txt.

I also have a folder on another, networked computer called TEXT FILES which has three text files in it called four.txt, five.txt, six.txt.

I want to end up with one TEXT FILES folder on my first computer with all the txt files in it.

On Windows, I merely drag the TEXT FILES folder from the second computer to the first, answer yes to the prompt about whether I wish to replace the like named files and I'm done.

If I do that on OSX, I will lose one.txt, two.txt, and three.txt unless I manually drag each txt file from the second computer to the first.

No big deal when you have three small files. However, when you've got thousands of files the process takes hours if not days of mindnumbing dragging and dropping on a Mac.

When I switched from Windows to Mac, no one told me that the behaviour on OSX was so diff from Windows and I lost over 10 thousand MP3 files that I'd bought from emusic.com.

dobbs seems to be saying...

What I'm saying is that after years on a Windows machine such behaviour from the OS becomes ingrained. I would have appreciated if someone told me about this difference in the OSes when I switched.

I'm also saying that Mac not having a way (that I've been able to find) to merge folders is pretty fucking stupid for an otherwise intelligent OS.
posted by dobbs at 7:44 PM on August 9, 2004

I've always used RsyncX for my (almost non-existent) merging needs, dobbs.

And, for the record, I agree that it is stupid for the destination folder to be deleted; I would much prefer it if it trashed the replaced folder. That way, it would still work as expected for Mac users, but allow an extra step for people to reconsider a possible mistake.
posted by boaz at 8:28 PM on August 9, 2004

Welcome to Macintosh!

Before you begin, please note that if you have a folder and 3 files in it, then another folder with 3 other files in it, and the folders have the same name, dragging one folder over the other will replace the first three files. Be warned.

Ok! Next, please double-click on the installation icon on your desktop to begin!

That sucks you lost your files, and I apologize for the smart-ass comment, but the idea that Apple can't merge folders and someone should have told you strikes me as a little, well, niche of an issue.
posted by jragon at 8:42 PM on August 9, 2004

Thanks for the link boaz!
posted by dobbs at 8:52 PM on August 9, 2004

Before you snark jragon, think about it for a second: if you want to directly delete a folder in the Finder, you first have to move it to the trash and then empty the trash before it's gone. Before Windows 95, the Trash Can was considered one of the Mac's huge advantages; it provided users a way to reconsider potentially disastrous changes.

So why, when you indirectly delete a folder (by replacing it), does the Finder decide to permanently delete it? Especially in an age when new computers come with 80 GB drives minimum, it just makes no sense to try to instantly reclaim disk space at the expense of giving users a chance to reconsider possible mistakes. It's not a matter of Mac vs. Windows* so much as a situation where the Mac fails to live up to its own standards.

* though being unforgiving of Windows-isms seems like a really bad idea when you're actively trying to get people to switch from Windows.
posted by boaz at 9:30 PM on August 9, 2004

Gotcha, dobbs. I understand what you meant now. But in any instance where I would want to merge the contents of two folders, I (longtime Mac user, mercifully minimal Windows experience) would have automatically opened Folder 2, selected all the files and folders to be merged and dragged them into Folder 1. Moving a file/folder from one place to another, where there's another file/folder of the same name and expecting the computer to merge the contents instead of overwrite them seems odd, but I'm not seeing it from a Windows user's perspective. Forget folders—in Windows, if you moved foo.txt to a location where there was another foo.txt, would the documents be merged? No, right? Not to threadjack, I'm just curious.

Anyway, I prefer the Mac OS's uniform way of handling the moving of files/folders (You know these all have the same name, right?) instead of the Windows way of handling files and folders differently. Chacun a son gout, though.
posted by emelenjr at 9:30 PM on August 9, 2004

emelenjr, Forget folders—in Windows, if you moved foo.txt to a location where there was another foo.txt, would the documents be merged? No, right? Not to threadjack, I'm just curious.

No. It doesn't merge documents. It only merges contents of folders. In your example, foo.txt would overwrite foo.txt. However, if another file, not called foo.txt was also in that folder, it would be deleted on a Mac, which is the part that seems illogical to me.

Anyway, I prefer the Mac OS's uniform way of handling the moving of files/folders (You know these all have the same name, right?) instead of the Windows way of handling files and folders differently.

To each his own, I guess. I prefer them to be treated different. I don't like on Macs how everything is alphabetical. I'd prefer all my folders to be at the top of the list (alphabetically) and then have the files alphabetically under those.
posted by dobbs at 9:43 PM on August 9, 2004

badstone: sorry that your thread was jacked.

dobbs: thank you. That might be very important to me someday.
posted by trharlan at 9:51 PM on August 9, 2004

I would have automatically opened Folder 2, selected all the files and folders to be merged and dragged them into Folder 1.

This is fine and easy with a small file structure and few files. But as soon as something gets more complicated, it takes forever. Consider this file structure, which I think is common:

MUSIC
|_ ARTIST ONE
  |__ ALBUM
    |_ tracks...
|_ ARTIST TWO
  |_ ALBUM
    |_ tracks...

Multiply the artists x 100 and suppose I have 2 albums by each artist with 13 tracks on each album. Mirror the structure on another drive/computer.

Now, your solution takes hours because you have to open each ALBUM folder in each ARTIST folder, select the tracks, drag and drop them, and repeat ad naseum. Seems very illogical to me.

badstone: sorry that your thread was jacked.

Yes, sorry badstone. I wasn't intending to babble on so much. :(
posted by dobbs at 9:55 PM on August 9, 2004

badstone: sorry that your thread was jacked.

Uh yeah. Sorry about that. To make it up, I used a freeware automation tool called Youpi Key a while ago that did what you want; however, it's since been bought up and rebranded as iKey, with a $20-30 price tag. Still, it was a diamond in the rough back then, and it's doubtless gotten a bit of a polish now that it's shareware, so it may be worth checking out.
posted by boaz at 10:12 PM on August 9, 2004

dobbs, sort/keep aranged by kind will give you your desired order.

Also I still don't understand what you're talking about, dragging a folder called "text files" on another folder called "text files", would give you a directory structure like text files/text files with one.txt, two.txt, three.txt, and a folder "text files" in the folder, inside the second "text files" folder would be 4, 5 and 6.

Oh, on preview I see what you're talking about I guess, I never knew windows would merge folders with the same name placed in the same location, that would never cross my mind. Also, what you need to do with merging those folders just seems clearly a more complex task than copying a folder, I wouldn't even think to do it that way, but i grew up on macs only.

I just have to say I replace directories where I want the new directory to overwrite the old one a lot more often than I want them merged, in the rare cases I want that I would use rsync or something. What happens in a merge if the internal documents are the same name also? Does windows use the newest one? Seems very messy, and very windows.
posted by rhyax at 10:18 PM on August 9, 2004

If the action to replace one folder with another folder merged instead of replacing, it would drive me nuts. Having a dialog pop-up to give the option of merge or replace would be ideal, but having this action cause a replace is more logically consistent from an interface design point-of-view. That Windows users are trained to expect a merge is a problem for switchers, but I can't fault the original Finder design. I agree that all files in a replace operation should be moved to the trash instead of automatic deletion.

Re: eriko's comment – the Mac never had "open-apple" & "closed-apple" keys; that was strictly an Apple III, IIe, IIc, and IIgs thing. The apple symbol snuck onto the command key in 1987 with the introduction of the Mac II and SE designs.

Re: badstone's original post – besides remapping your keyboard, I recommend getting a Kensington mouse. The MouseWorks software lets you assign keystrokes to buttons. I've got one mouse button sending command-leftarrow when in web browsers.
posted by D.C. at 1:55 AM on August 10, 2004

To continue the hijack, I think that this chapter of Joel Spolsky's UI book is right on, regarding the Mac/Windows/Etc "problems". (Skip to the bit about two thirds of the way down, about "typical Windows power user named Pete" for the relevantivity.)
posted by majcher at 8:59 AM on August 10, 2004

OK, I tried out uControl this morning and it doesn't do what I want. It does a couple keyboard remappings, but the documentation specifically says that it does not do arbitrary remappings. In fact, it has that same maddening Mac philosophy that "the layout is already nice", meaning no mattter how frustrated you are with something, some designer somewhere who does graphic art all day knows better than you and how dare you question his wisdom! Bleh.

Oh, and yes, I also did a simple merge test and Mac does in fact nuke your files in an unrecoverable way.

My regret about the switch is growing...
posted by badstone at 9:14 AM on August 10, 2004

furthermore, if you do try to set keyboard shortcuts through system preferences, "home" (and most other keys) is not an allowable shortcut.
posted by badstone at 9:32 AM on August 10, 2004

You haven't told us what *exactly* you want Home and End, which do have uses on Macs, to do and in which contexts (window? filename typing? document?). Nonetheless, look at QuicKeys.
posted by joeclark at 9:38 AM on August 10, 2004

this is what I want: whenever I type text anywhere, "home" should bring you to the beginning of the line, "end" should bring you to the end of the line. I know that sometimes in some contexts these keys may do this. In other contexts you need to press apple-arrow, in other contexts, you do some other thing, but most of the time you have to press apple-arrow. I don't want to have to remember all those variations and contexts, and I don't want to have to press multiple keys to make this simple, decades old bit of functionality happen.

Just glanced at QuickKeys - do I really need to pay $100 to make this happen?
posted by badstone at 9:43 AM on August 10, 2004

I just did a test on this web page. Home takes you to the top of the page and End takes you to the end. I then pasted a huge chunk of text in this text box. While the text box is active (there's an outline around it—click outside it and you'll see the outline go away, meaning inactive) Home and End take you to the beginning and end, respectively.

I suppose maybe it's not consistent across the board, though.
posted by emelenjr at 10:08 AM on August 10, 2004

i'm not talking about scrolling, I'm talking about insertion point. e.g. click in the URL box of this page then press home and end - nothing happens. you have to carefully click your mouse in just the right spot, tap an arrow key multiple times, or press apple-arrow. I'm used to just clicking any old place in a text field, or just tabbing to it, then pressing home or end to get to where I want to start making changes. (I should also be able to press shift-home or shift-end to select from the insertion point to the end or the beginning. doing this on a mac is a complicated three finger salute.)

scrolling pages is what PageUp and PageDown were invented for.
posted by badstone at 10:15 AM on August 10, 2004

If the action to replace one folder with another folder merged instead of replacing, it would drive me nuts. Having a dialog pop-up to give the option of merge or replace would be ideal, but having this action cause a replace is more logically consistent from an interface design point-of-view. That Windows users are trained to expect a merge is a problem for switchers, but I can't fault the original Finder design. I agree that all files in a replace operation should be moved to the trash instead of automatic deletion.

See, that's stupid. If you pull your files out of one (physical, on your desk) folder and stick them in another the files previously in Folder Number Two do not mysteriously vanish in a puff of smoke. Why should your computer do it otherwise?

However, that's not why it's stupid. It's stupid because, on a Windows PC, if you want to replace the contents of a folder it's very easy; you delete what's in it and then drag the new stuff in. So on Windows both merging and replacing are simple and straightforward.

On a Mac, replacing is straightforward but merging is not, at least in the case Dobbs describes where you have a significantly nested filestructure. Merging is, in fact, a royal pain in the ass requiring hours of tedious manual clicking to do in any volume.

That's why this is stupid; it reduces functionality.
posted by IshmaelGraves at 10:32 AM on August 10, 2004

badstone, as someone who switched, I can feel your pain. That said, I don't think apple-arrow is such a sacrifice. Though when I first switched there were plenty of things I thought ridiculous, I got used to the common things (like the end/home thing) very quickly, though I grumbled about it a lot at first. Now, it's just as ingrained as my Windows actions were.

My regret about the switch is growing...

Mine reached a peak when I lost all those files. :)

But honestly, once you understand how things work, you'll love the machine. I was a PC user for 15 years or so and my Powerbook is easily the best computer I've ever owned. I wouldn't switch back for anything.

You should also check out Mac Mentor, a site for switchers. Pose the same question there as you did here. Perhaps someone will have a better or cheaper app suggestion for you.
posted by dobbs at 10:36 AM on August 10, 2004

I'm talking about insertion point. e.g. click in the URL box of this page then press home and end - nothing happens.

up-arrow and down-arrow works in URL boxes.

See, that's stupid. If you pull your files out of one (physical, on your desk) folder and stick them in another the files previously in Folder Number Two do not mysteriously vanish in a puff of smoke. Why should your computer do it otherwise?

And if you do the representative action on the Mac, selecting all the files from one folder and dragging them into the other folder, the expected action happens. What you're expecting is to physically replace one folder in your drawer with another with the same name, and expect that the files inside the folders should automatically merge, which is not what happens in real life.
posted by gyc at 10:53 AM on August 10, 2004

Point taken (Ishmael). But in the real world, would someone necessarily have two folders of the same name with different contents, and then take one whole folder and store it in the other folder? I'd say no, he'd first open the folder and take the documents out of it, then stick the documents in the other folder. A folder called "My Stuff" inside another folder called "My Stuff," which contains different stuff from the first folder, isn't all that practical, is it? I think that's the reason why the idea of merging the contents of two folders by essentially physically putting one whole folder inside another whole folder seems so foreign to me. The idea of two computer files/folders with the same name not being allowed to both exist in the same place, on the other hand, doesn't seem hard to grasp.

On preview, badstone, what dobbs and gyc said. I hope you'll find some reasons to like your Mac.
posted by emelenjr at 10:57 AM on August 10, 2004

Oh, I'm definitely learning to like some things. But, the main thing I've learned is that, out of the box, the Mac is a pain in the ass for me to use. But, on the other hand it is very customizable and that helps - e.g. installing Quicksilver really saved my sanity as I was going nuts not being able to launch apps from the keyboard. Once I customize it enough, I have a feeling that I will like it a lot.

In general, the lack of smart use of the keyboard characterizes most of my Mac problems, especially since Mac users are expected to use a one button moust. So much of the keyboard usage is seemingly inconsistent and complex. The mascot of my frustration with the Mac keyboard is probably the key to the left of the keyboard - it has an Apple on it and a pound sign/clover leaf on it, and then is referred to as "command." Sometimes it does the job of the Ctrl key, even though there is already a Ctrl key and sometimes not. The only way to know is to read lots and lots of docs, you can't just intuitively explore things.
posted by badstone at 11:20 AM on August 10, 2004

emelenjr: A folder called "My Stuff" inside another folder called "My Stuff," which contains different stuff from the first folder, isn't all that practical, is it? I think that's the reason why the idea of merging the contents of two folders by essentially physically putting one whole folder inside another whole folder seems so foreign to me.

No one's suggesting that. We're talking about one MY STUFF folder with the contents of the (previously) two MY STUFF folders in it.

It's much easier to explain this to someone when you're showing them rather than trying to type it out. Here's as simple as I can make it.

Computer ONE has a folder called Music on it. Inside is a folder called DYLAN and inside that is a folder called HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED which has the tracks.

Computer TWO has a folder called Music on it. Inside is a folder called DYLAN and inside that is a folder called BLONDE ON BLONDE which has the tracks.

I open the MUSIC folder on TWO and drag the DYLAN folder to the MUSIC folder on ONE.

On Windows I would end up with a folder on ONE called MUSIC, inside of which is two folders, BLONDE ON BLONDE and HIGHWAY 61 REVISTED, each with their respective tracks in them.

On a Mac I'd have a MUSIC folder with only BLONDE ON BLONDE in it and HIGHWAY 61 would be gone forever.

Yes, you could easily open up one folder further and drag the BLONDE ON BLONDE folder on TWO to the DYLAN folder on ONE, but when you have lots of music, it means you have to do this for every single album. On Windows, it's one drag and drop.

Further, if you really wanted to get rid of HIGHWAY 61 on ONE, you could just drag it to the trash pre-dragging BLONDE (a measly one additional drag).
posted by dobbs at 12:33 PM on August 10, 2004

Now that I've got a better handle on your problem, I'm not sure there's something that will satisfy you 100%, since overriding home and end will break the scroll to top/bottom action they normally do everywhere else (in Windows too).

However, there's a partial solution. If you create a plaintext file (but make sure it doesn't add the .txt extension) at

~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict

with the contents:

{
"\Uf729" = "moveToBeginningOfLine:";
"\Uf72b" = "moveToEndOfLine:";
}

then it will re-route the home and end keys as you want, but only in Cocoa applications* (explanation here for the curious). So, for example, XCode, TextEdit, Safari and Mail will honor it, but BBEdit, Finder and Firefox won't.

* Well, in Cocoa apps that use the Cocoa Text System, which is almost all, or Carbon apps that use the HITextView class, which is almost none.
posted by boaz at 12:35 PM on August 10, 2004

Also, don't suffer through using the Apple Pro Mouse. For all Apple's expectations, a two-button mouse with a scroll wheel works almost exactly like it does on Windows out of the box, and Microsoft and Logitech mice have OS X drivers that'll let you customize them as you see fit. You can probably eBay off the Apple one for more than a basic MS optical mouse costs anyway.
posted by boaz at 1:03 PM on August 10, 2004

but BBEdit, Finder and Firefox won't.

:(
OK, OK... I give up... You win this time Apple, I'll break down and retrain myself.
posted by badstone at 1:05 PM on August 10, 2004

(and yes, I am using a two-buttoned mouse with a wheel. I keep bringing up the one-button mouse thing because it just exemplifies how bizarre Apple's thinking is...)
posted by badstone at 1:07 PM on August 10, 2004

I keep bringing up the one-button mouse thing because it just exemplifies how bizarre Apple's thinking is...

Based on my personal experiences, it's not that bizarre. Multiple buttons are very confusing to a goodnumber of people I know.
posted by gyc at 1:23 PM on August 10, 2004

no, the bizarreness points I was making was that while on the one hand, Apple preaches simplicity in the form of a one button mouse. On the other hand, they have three different modfier keys, with a total of 5 or 6 labels, depending on how you look at it. it's like they took the button(s) they removed from the mouse and transported it(them) to the keyboard.
posted by badstone at 1:40 PM on August 10, 2004

Based on my personal experiences, it's not that bizarre.

It is when one of their mice is bluetooth, meaning you don't have to be near the keyboard to use it... and you therefore have no way of doing anything but a "left" click.

boaz, kickass of you to throw that code together!
posted by dobbs at 7:35 PM on August 10, 2004

The modifyer keys are only there for power users, novice users are free to use the one button mouse and not use the modifier keys at all, you don't actually need them to do anything. I think this exemplifies the mac design actually, easy for the people who don't want it, and plenty of power in the form of modifier keys for those that do. (as well as support for multibutton mice, which I think anyone who can use should)

The mascot of my frustration with the Mac keyboard is probably the key to the left of the keyboard - it has an Apple on it and a pound sign/clover leaf on it, and then is referred to as "command." Sometimes it does the job of the Ctrl key, even though there is already a Ctrl key and sometimes not. The only way to know is to read lots and lots of docs, you can't just intuitively explore things.

That's just not true, first, forget what you think about the control key on windows, the command key is the main modifier key. Usually the command key plus letters will activate common menu items, as they are listed in the menu, and these are pretty standard across the OS. You can explore by using the menus and seeing what the modifier key for that action is.

Go to the Finder, in help (command-?) click new to mac osx, then "for windows switchers", then "useful keyboard shortcuts". There are some there that are not obvious of course, but the list is pretty exhaustive, you can find the common ones very easily in any application.
posted by rhyax at 7:26 AM on August 11, 2004