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.
The Extended Keyboard II came with a plastic overlay for the function keys. It showed Cut/Copy/Paste for F2/F3/F4 respectively. See <a href="https://chrispeak.com/2022/04/08/apple-extended-ii" rel="nofollow">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.
The Extended Keyboard not-II had the words printed below they keys.
<a href="https://deskthority.net/wiki/File:Apple_M0115_top.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://deskthority.net/wiki/File:Apple_M0115_top.jpg
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: <a href="https://pomelo.shockfox.net/pub/img/powerlite.jpg" rel="nofollow">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)
They can't, those keys are too far away for such common operations. And Fn keys are just as bad, so replacing with them would also have been a mistake
I don't see a clear advantage over the the ZXCV shortcut placement which the Macintosh team chose. (The original Finder had no specific Redo shortcut because it was single-undo and ⌘-Z performed both undo and redo.) Even well-placed dedicated keys on a Xerox-style (or later Sun-style) "fun cluster" <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBiWtJJN5zk" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBiWtJJN5zk to the left of the alphabetic cluster would have forced the hand to move further away from the home row. Of course ZXCV is much less well-adapted to the left-handed, but that would probably be true of any dedicated keys as well, unless they were mirrored on both sides of the keyboard.
> […] left of the alphabetic cluster would have forced the hand to move further away from the home row.
The Star left cluster are primarily operations that pair the left hand on the keys with the right hand on the mouse. This derives from Engelbart's Mother of All Demos with the left-side keyset paired with the right-side mouse.
> The Star left cluster are primarily operations that pair the left hand on the keys with the right hand on the mouse.
Sure (this is demonstrated in the linked video, for instance) but the ZXCV group is pretty similar in that respect. Even for operations which involve the mouse it's preferable to drag only one hand far away from its home position, rather than both of them. (Especially since the video evidence <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q seems to suggest that Star users tended to move their left hand only after making the mouse selection, instead of prepositioning it.) And the Star's Undo key, which presumably doesn't require help from mouse input and is likely to be needed after a non-mouse action, isn't placed any more conveniently near the home row: it's simply in the right side-cluster rather than the left one.
At least we get cmd and control as separate keys still, which makes copy/paste/… in a terminal a breeze, without either needing to sacrifice terminal control keys, or remember to use different c/p sequences in different scenarios.
I work primarily on Macs, but also have Windows machines on my desk. Switching to Windows, I always have to pause and think, "Wait… I'm supposed to press what to copy again?"
Conflating meta keys with control keys is one of the more pernicious abominations Microsoft saddled on the tech world.
Shift - Control - Meta - Super - Hyper. Each has its place.
Don't forget the Terminal key, so you can summon the elevator with Terminal-E and buzz open the door in the elevator lobby with Terminal-D, all without getting up out of your chair in front of your Lisp Machine.
Double bucky, you're the one!
You make my keyboard lots of fun
Double bucky, an additional bit or two:
(Vo-vo-de-o!)
Control and Meta side by side,
Augmented ASCII, nine bits wide!
Double bucky, a half a thousand glyphs,
plus a few!
Oh,
I sure wish that I
Had a couple of
bits more!
Perhaps a
Set of pedals to
Make the number of
Bits four:
Double double bucky!
Double bucky, left and right
OR'd together, outta sight!
Double bucky, I'd like a whole word of
Double bucky, I'm happy I heard of
Double bucky, I'd like a whole
word of you!
(For those of you who are interested, the term "bucky bits" comes from Niklaus Wirth, known as "bucky" to friends, who suggested that an extra bit be added to terminal codes on 36 bit machines for use by screen editors.)
The UniPress Emacs icon was a unicorn, because after you held down all the modifier keys with both hands, you need a horn on your head to press the actual letter.
So "Uni[Corn Key]Press Emacs".
You can see it in the lower left corner of this screen snapshot, but the horn is covered by a tabbed emacs window:
Early Mac design was excellent overall, but decided not to include these keys (maybe they were leaning towards Smalltalk-like context menus?), and then seemed to go into more cryptic and power-user in-the-know keyboard direction (like with the 3-icon key including special support for flipping burgers):
They didn't leave the functions out. They left the words off the keys and put the functions on Command-ZXCV, which you only know if someone already told you. The Extended Keyboard later printed Cut/Copy/Paste under F2-F4, or shipped a plastic overlay. That is a confession, not a design.
Xerox Star put labeled keys in a left-hand cluster meant to work with the mouse in the other hand, which is the Engelbart pairing. Apple chose not to. Printing Copy on C would have been the cheap half of that lesson.
The missing keycaps are still the small complaint. The theft was the words.
>Consider the "clipboard" on the Mac, PC or XWindows. It's just like a regular clipboard, except (a) you can't see it, (b) it holds only one object, (c) whatever you put there destroys the previous contents. Aside from that, IT'S JUST LIKE A REGULAR CLIPBOARD IN EVERY OTHER RESPECT-- EXCEPT THERE AREN'T ANY OTHER RESPECTS!
>I see this pseudo-clipboard as stupidity at its height: a really terrible, destructive mechanism, excused by a word that makes it sound somehow okay. It is a further offense-- the greatest atrocity in the computer field, I believe-- that the crippled and destructive functions of this pseudo-clipboard have been falsely given the names "cut" and "paste"-- which for decades have meant something ENTIRELY different to writers, the function of parallel rearrangement with all things visible.
He said it again at BayCHI in 2021. YouTube's auto-captions turned one line into "many signs sound okay." I wrote him. He did not argue with the sense of the passage. He did correct one attribution: "long form work" is Tesler's phrase, from their emails, not Ted's. Cleaned transcript of the public talk (intent, not a court reporter):
Copy of HCI Constructs Then and Now with Ted Nelson:
>So what does cut and paste mean today? Those holy words, referring to the highest faculties of an author's overview, have been assigned to a strange construct called the clipboard: an invisible buffer. You can't see it, and it holds only one object. In other respects it is like a physical clipboard, except there aren't any other respects.
>So cut and paste -- those formerly sacred words for the mind's highest faculty -- have been used to propagandize this abominable construct. These features should have been called hide and plug, but somehow using those familiar old words makes them sound okay, like the words "national socialism." So they could at least have made it visible and made it a stack for rearrangement. But oh no.
>Now this crime against humanity -- calling the hide-and-plug functions cut and paste -- was perpetrated by a good friend of mine, the late Larry Tesler. And he kept insisting to me -- we had many emails on the subject -- that the real cut and paste was only for very specialist long-form work.
NY Times copy boy (1960s): First morning task — scrape dried paste from glass pots, refill with wet library paste (three on city desk, foreign, economics). Reporters cut sections, paste down, rewrite between. Yell copy → pneumatic tube to typesetting. "This was called cut and paste and indeed it was."
Grandmother's Tolstoy story: Daughter's lecture — Tolstoy dictates two longhand copies; one filed, one cut up all over the dacha floor; walking in woods: "Don't touch my noodles"; returns to paste in new order and dictate next draft.
Slide (Ted Selker showed): Ted's 1965 ACM article noodles — bad reproduction of actual cutting/pasting with photo of real noodles.
A keycap that says Paste would still be hide-and-plug. It would just confess on the plastic. What writers meant was noodles on the table, everything visible, rearrange, then paste. Ted still does that with scissors.
>The terms "cut" and "paste" were redefined in 1984, when the Macintosh came out-- "cut" now meant HIDE and "paste" meant PLUG-- and as a result, there are no decent tools for large-scale rearrangement.
>Tolstoy cut his manuscripts into pieces that he called his "noodles"-- then he would rearrange them and paste them into a new order, adding text and crossing out, then dictating a new draft to his daughters, one to be cut up again. (My grandmother heard this in a lecture by one of his daughters.)
>Balzac wore a knife around his neck for cutting up his manuscripts-- but such rearrangement is impossible with today's computer software.
>Personally, in the 1960s I had huge paper cut at the factory-- about 14" wide by 40" long-- for massive rearrangement by REAL cutting and pasting of big manuscripts. I still have some of that big paper.
>This shows the actual cut and paste process, done physically, that has been denied to us by software since those two words were redefined in 1984 to mean "hide" (on the invisible hideyhole called misleadingly the "clipboard") and "plug" (whatever's in the invisible hideyhole) to wherever you're pointing.
>Or since the letters used on both Mac and Windows are C and V, they could better have stood for Cram and Vomit.
Ted Nelson — invisible clipboard rant (source catalog):
amelius · · focus · HN ↗
Cockbrand · · focus · HN ↗
Not sure if this was ever supported system-wide in any way, though.
kps · · focus · HN ↗
Cockbrand · · focus · HN ↗
spijdar · · focus · HN ↗
(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)
amelius · · focus · HN ↗
eviks · · focus · HN ↗
cpach · · focus · HN ↗
spijdar · · focus · HN ↗
The one and only web host [2] written in Nim [0], running on Sprite [1] ;-)
[0] <a href="http://nim-lang.org/" rel="nofollow">http://nim-lang.org/
[1] <a href="https://github.com/OSPreservProject/sprite/blob/master/sprite.txt" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/OSPreservProject/sprite/blob/master/sprit...
[2] <a href="https://pomelo.shockfox.net/pub/src/httpd.nim" rel="nofollow">https://pomelo.shockfox.net/pub/src/httpd.nim
roldie · · focus · HN ↗
dchest · · focus · HN ↗
reaperducer · · focus · HN ↗
I bind Delete to F12 on every machine I use. It's a wonderful thing.
leoc · · focus · HN ↗
kps · · focus · HN ↗
The Star left cluster are primarily operations that pair the left hand on the keys with the right hand on the mouse. This derives from Engelbart's Mother of All Demos with the left-side keyset paired with the right-side mouse.
leoc · · focus · HN ↗
Sure (this is demonstrated in the linked video, for instance) but the ZXCV group is pretty similar in that respect. Even for operations which involve the mouse it's preferable to drag only one hand far away from its home position, rather than both of them. (Especially since the video evidence <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q seems to suggest that Star users tended to move their left hand only after making the mouse selection, instead of prepositioning it.) And the Star's Undo key, which presumably doesn't require help from mouse input and is likely to be needed after a non-mouse action, isn't placed any more conveniently near the home row: it's simply in the right side-cluster rather than the left one.
bdavbdav · · focus · HN ↗
reaperducer · · focus · HN ↗
Conflating meta keys with control keys is one of the more pernicious abominations Microsoft saddled on the tech world.
Shift - Control - Meta - Super - Hyper. Each has its place.
DonHopkins · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40634902">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40634902
Guy L Steele wrote "Double Bucky" in 1978:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14372023">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14372023
Double Bucky
(C) 1978 by Guy L. Steele, Jr.
(Sung to the tune of "Rubber Duckie")
(For those of you who are interested, the term "bucky bits" comes from Niklaus Wirth, known as "bucky" to friends, who suggested that an extra bit be added to terminal codes on 36 bit machines for use by screen editors.)The UniPress Emacs icon was a unicorn, because after you held down all the modifier keys with both hands, you need a horn on your head to press the actual letter.
So "Uni[Corn Key]Press Emacs".
You can see it in the lower left corner of this screen snapshot, but the horn is covered by a tabbed emacs window:
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#/media/File:HyperTIESAuthoring.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#/media/File:Hy...
Sun format Unicorn icon from the UniPress Emacs sources:
<a href="https://github.com/SimHacker/NeMACS/blob/main/src/D.sun/unicorn.icon" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/SimHacker/NeMACS/blob/main/src/D.sun/unic...
neilv · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://deskauthority.saberkeebs.com/wiki.themk.org/index.php/Fun_cluster.html" rel="nofollow">https://deskauthority.saberkeebs.com/wiki.themk.org/index.ph...
<a href="https://deskthority.net/download/file.php?id=59173" rel="nofollow">https://deskthority.net/download/file.php?id=59173
Early Mac design was excellent overall, but decided not to include these keys (maybe they were leaning towards Smalltalk-like context menus?), and then seemed to go into more cryptic and power-user in-the-know keyboard direction (like with the 3-icon key including special support for flipping burgers):
<a href="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/key-symbols-we-lost-to-time-pt-2-the-mac-side/6.1600w.avif" rel="nofollow">https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/key-symbols-we-lost-to-ti...
DonHopkins · · focus · HN ↗
Xerox Star put labeled keys in a left-hand cluster meant to work with the mouse in the other hand, which is the Engelbart pairing. Apple chose not to. Printing Copy on C would have been the cheap half of that lesson.
The missing keycaps are still the small complaint. The theft was the words.
Ted Nelson, 1999, in his own type:
<a href="http://hyperland.com/TedCompOneLiners" rel="nofollow">http://hyperland.com/TedCompOneLiners
>Consider the "clipboard" on the Mac, PC or XWindows. It's just like a regular clipboard, except (a) you can't see it, (b) it holds only one object, (c) whatever you put there destroys the previous contents. Aside from that, IT'S JUST LIKE A REGULAR CLIPBOARD IN EVERY OTHER RESPECT-- EXCEPT THERE AREN'T ANY OTHER RESPECTS!
>I see this pseudo-clipboard as stupidity at its height: a really terrible, destructive mechanism, excused by a word that makes it sound somehow okay. It is a further offense-- the greatest atrocity in the computer field, I believe-- that the crippled and destructive functions of this pseudo-clipboard have been falsely given the names "cut" and "paste"-- which for decades have meant something ENTIRELY different to writers, the function of parallel rearrangement with all things visible.
He said it again at BayCHI in 2021. YouTube's auto-captions turned one line into "many signs sound okay." I wrote him. He did not argue with the sense of the passage. He did correct one attribution: "long form work" is Tesler's phrase, from their emails, not Ted's. Cleaned transcript of the public talk (intent, not a court reporter):
Copy of HCI Constructs Then and Now with Ted Nelson:
<a href="https://youtu.be/dOLXLk8TbxQ?t=661" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/dOLXLk8TbxQ?t=661
>So what does cut and paste mean today? Those holy words, referring to the highest faculties of an author's overview, have been assigned to a strange construct called the clipboard: an invisible buffer. You can't see it, and it holds only one object. In other respects it is like a physical clipboard, except there aren't any other respects.
>So cut and paste -- those formerly sacred words for the mind's highest faculty -- have been used to propagandize this abominable construct. These features should have been called hide and plug, but somehow using those familiar old words makes them sound okay, like the words "national socialism." So they could at least have made it visible and made it a stack for rearrangement. But oh no.
>Now this crime against humanity -- calling the hide-and-plug functions cut and paste -- was perpetrated by a good friend of mine, the late Larry Tesler. And he kept insisting to me -- we had many emails on the subject -- that the real cut and paste was only for very specialist long-form work.
NY Times copy boy (1960s): First morning task — scrape dried paste from glass pots, refill with wet library paste (three on city desk, foreign, economics). Reporters cut sections, paste down, rewrite between. Yell copy → pneumatic tube to typesetting. "This was called cut and paste and indeed it was."
Grandmother's Tolstoy story: Daughter's lecture — Tolstoy dictates two longhand copies; one filed, one cut up all over the dacha floor; walking in woods: "Don't touch my noodles"; returns to paste in new order and dictate next draft.
Slide (Ted Selker showed): Ted's 1965 ACM article noodles — bad reproduction of actual cutting/pasting with photo of real noodles.
A keycap that says Paste would still be hide-and-plug. It would just confess on the plastic. What writers meant was noodles on the table, everything visible, rearrange, then paste. Ted still does that with scissors.
Real cut and paste-- STILL NEEDED BY WRITERS !
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_35RDA6r3g" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_35RDA6r3g
>The terms "cut" and "paste" were redefined in 1984, when the Macintosh came out-- "cut" now meant HIDE and "paste" meant PLUG-- and as a result, there are no decent tools for large-scale rearrangement.
>Tolstoy cut his manuscripts into pieces that he called his "noodles"-- then he would rearrange them and paste them into a new order, adding text and crossing out, then dictating a new draft to his daughters, one to be cut up again. (My grandmother heard this in a lecture by one of his daughters.)
>Balzac wore a knife around his neck for cutting up his manuscripts-- but such rearrangement is impossible with today's computer software.
>Personally, in the 1960s I had huge paper cut at the factory-- about 14" wide by 40" long-- for massive rearrangement by REAL cutting and pasting of big manuscripts. I still have some of that big paper.
Cut and Paste, 2014, by Ted Nelson:
<a href="https://archive.org/details/cutnpaste_201909" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/cutnpaste_201909
>This shows the actual cut and paste process, done physically, that has been denied to us by software since those two words were redefined in 1984 to mean "hide" (on the invisible hideyhole called misleadingly the "clipboard") and "plug" (whatever's in the invisible hideyhole) to wherever you're pointing.
>Or since the letters used on both Mac and Windows are C and V, they could better have stood for Cram and Vomit.
Ted Nelson — invisible clipboard rant (source catalog):
<a href="https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main/characters/ted-nelson/sources/invisible-clipboard-rant-catalog.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...