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Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 2: The Mac side

163 points · 89 comments · zdw

  1. II2II · · focus · HN ↗
    I'm wondering where those Canadian keyboards are used. I live in Canada, have seen plenty of multilingual keyboards, and have seen those symbols perhaps once. Even so I can't be sure it was on a keyboard. I just recognized one of the symbols.
    1. graypegg · · focus · HN ↗
      I bought my MBP in Québec, with the default keyboard they stock.

      <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;f.toi.sh&#x2F;fr-ca-mbp.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;f.toi.sh&#x2F;fr-ca-mbp.jpg (Pardon the dust!! You never really look too closely as your keyboard until you have to take a picture of it eh?)

      Tab, capslock, shift, backspace, and return are all symbols-only. I feel like I have a pretty good ambient understanding of what they mean at a glance so I think I&#x27;ve always seen them on fr-CA layouts I&#x27;ve used.

      Was trying to communicate to a designer in Ontario a while ago that we could use the backspace symbol for a correction key in a PIN entry view. We were working on an iOS application so I was immediately thinking that the apple default UI font would have exactly that &quot;chevron with a cross&quot; symbol styled how it looks on the keyboard somewhere in it. Designer was pretty confused about it though, so I think it&#x27;s probably just fr-CA keyboards.

      1. swiftcoder · · focus · HN ↗
        I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve seen a French-Canadian keyboard before, that is so much less cursed than the AZERTY monstrosity I have from France (hold shift to type numbers! hold shift to type period and comma!)
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