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.
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" 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 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.
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):
(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)
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.
Aaaah, he's got carriage return and enter mixed up. The whole reason for the symbol being an arrow returning to the beginning of the line, is because it's the return key. I love the Canadian enter symbol, an arrow pointing into a box.
No. He calls the big one Enter presumably in recognition that’s what people know it as (check how any cross-platform web app calls it), and the numpad one Return/Enter because that’s what it is collectively known as across all the platforms. This all makes sense to me. Since the keys on the photos don’t have labels, this feels better for a reader in 2026 than being overly pedantic.
Right, but if you're referring to Return as Enter, then there's no reason to refer to Enter as Return. The reason for the change is that people don't distinguish the two. If we're going to eliminate this distinction, we should do it properly!
(I've had blank looks from a few colleagues after suggesting they press the Return key (that being the term I used to refer to the Return key) - which makes me wonder what percentage of people even know that Return is the name of a key. Perhaps we should retire the term entirely.)
I think back in the day (say the late 80s) it became apparent to those in charge that this new IT thing was going to be very important in the workplace, and that it was going to be important to train up people to operate computers.
Given those in charge were probably one finger typists if that, and befuddled by technology, they would collectively have decided that computers should be standardised so that learnt skills would be transferrable, and therefore they probably imposed ideas like standardised keyboard layouts.
Of course it turned out that the next generation were totally capable of operating computers without any formal training, were totally fine with different operating systems, different keyboard layouts, different applications etc, and so there was probably lots of wasted effort solving a non-existent problem.
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.
I bought my MBP in Québec, with the default keyboard they stock.
https://f.toi.sh/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've always seen them on fr-CA layouts I'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 "chevron with a cross" symbol styled how it looks on the keyboard somewhere in it. Designer was pretty confused about it though, so I think it's probably just fr-CA keyboards.
Somewhat related: I live in France but have learnt computing on a QWERTY US keyboard back in the days, not AZERTY. As a result the only keyboard layout I can use without losing my sanity is a QWERTY US MacBook with a Canadian layout - I have my Q right where I want it, Enter key is lined up in the middle row, # $ % * are there for coding, and all the accents é è à ^ ç are there too. Thank you, Canada.
Perhaps, but I really don't know why a French keyboard would be different in Quebec compared to a French keyboard in the rest of Canada. There is a picture of a MacBook keyboard from another poster in this thread, which is what I would expect.
From a visual perspective I miss some of those more esoteric symbols, but the current Apple (US) keyboard gets it right. Symbols with text labels for modifiers and clear pictographs for the function keys (though the F3/Mission Control icon is a bit unclear until you click i and the behavior of F5/mic seems unhelpful). I just remember a few too many family tech support issues trying to help a struggling relative understand that command and 'open apple' are the same thing.
On the JIS 2003 model, the more traditional Control position is great (it’s how I map my boards) but the Caps Lock positioning is really good too and makes so much sense with how infrequently it’s used. Very little risk of accidentally hitting it. I wonder why more boards haven’t adopted it.
All this micro-management of these standards only serves to confuse people and ultimately causes entry errors and wastes time. Go find the relevant XKCD comic on your own.
The symbols are from a weird ISO/IEC standard (9995-7 ?) that never really caught on except in a few places. I have seen the lock-key symbols more often on lock light panels than on keycaps.
> You turned it sideways. Using a colon, a dash, and a parenthesis character in series, you could make a sideways smile or frown. It looked like this: [happy-face] or [sad-face]
Many European layouts do have more symbols outside ASCII. For example German has ° (degree) and ß (ess-tset) and § (paragraph).
German PC keyboards also tend to have µ on the M key, but it is available with the right Alt key.
Macintosh keyboard layouts tend to have many symbols on Option-combinations but they are not always printed.
ASCII is a 7-bit code, so there are only so many symbols one can add. Prior to ASCII, you had codes that used as few as 5 bits. Early C had the option to use digraphs to represent various forms of parenthesis, simply because symbols like {} and [] were not universal.
(Strictly speaking, people did continue adding symbols. We used to talk about code pages: when the MSB was 0, the other 7 bits were ASCII. When the MSB was 1, the other 7 bits were a user selected code pade.)
ASCII is 7-bit and fully filled out. Every other extended character system prior to Unicode was sporadically supported. C has digraphs and trigraphs because even the ASCII punctuation wasn't guaranteed to be available on all keyboards. IBM, notably had an APL typeball for their Selectric derived terminals but that was equivalent to switching character sets and not something that could be considered universal prior to Unicode.
> There was also the Japanese JIS standard keyboard
is a particularly humorous instance of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAS_syndrome
I don't think I've ever seen someone do this from both sides of the same abbreviation (eg. Automated ATM Machine) before now, that's quite amusing.
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.
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" 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 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.
And there was already precedent:
https://deskauthority.saberkeebs.com/wiki.themk.org/index.ph...
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):
https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/key-symbols-we-lost-to-ti...
The Extended Keyboard II came with a plastic overlay for the function keys. It showed Cut/Copy/Paste for F2/F3/F4 respectively. See 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. 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: 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
The least they could have done was print "Copy", "Paste", etc. on the keys that we now use for those tasks.
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.
The lack of delete has always annoyed me (and still does). I hate that I have to press fn backspace, or cursor to the end of the word.
You can also use Emacs keys (Ctrl-D) for one-handed delete. Very convenient when Caps Lock is remapped to Control.
The lack of delete has always annoyed me (and still does). I hate that I have to press fn backspace, or cursor to the end of the word.
I bind Delete to F12 on every machine I use. It's a wonderful thing.
Aaaah, he's got carriage return and enter mixed up. The whole reason for the symbol being an arrow returning to the beginning of the line, is because it's the return key. I love the Canadian enter symbol, an arrow pointing into a box.
Enter appropriated the same “arrow returning” symbol long ago, and the key is colloquially known more often as Enter these days.
Yes, but he calls the enter key return and the return key enter.
No. He calls the big one Enter presumably in recognition that’s what people know it as (check how any cross-platform web app calls it), and the numpad one Return/Enter because that’s what it is collectively known as across all the platforms. This all makes sense to me. Since the keys on the photos don’t have labels, this feels better for a reader in 2026 than being overly pedantic.
Right, but if you're referring to Return as Enter, then there's no reason to refer to Enter as Return. The reason for the change is that people don't distinguish the two. If we're going to eliminate this distinction, we should do it properly!
(I've had blank looks from a few colleagues after suggesting they press the Return key (that being the term I used to refer to the Return key) - which makes me wonder what percentage of people even know that Return is the name of a key. Perhaps we should retire the term entirely.)
I would love for Apple to move from Return to Enter as the default label, indeed.
I think back in the day (say the late 80s) it became apparent to those in charge that this new IT thing was going to be very important in the workplace, and that it was going to be important to train up people to operate computers.
Given those in charge were probably one finger typists if that, and befuddled by technology, they would collectively have decided that computers should be standardised so that learnt skills would be transferrable, and therefore they probably imposed ideas like standardised keyboard layouts.
Of course it turned out that the next generation were totally capable of operating computers without any formal training, were totally fine with different operating systems, different keyboard layouts, different applications etc, and so there was probably lots of wasted effort solving a non-existent problem.
Very nice post, I love computer history and lore and this fits just right!
I would also add ZX Spectrum keyboard with all the keywords on it. G/GOTO, L/LET, P/PRINT etc. Was lots of fun.
We should have engraved common actions on the keys when we could, before every software invented its own set of keyboard shortcuts.
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.
I bought my MBP in Québec, with the default keyboard they stock.
https://f.toi.sh/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've always seen them on fr-CA layouts I'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 "chevron with a cross" symbol styled how it looks on the keyboard somewhere in it. Designer was pretty confused about it though, so I think it's probably just fr-CA keyboards.
Somewhat related: I live in France but have learnt computing on a QWERTY US keyboard back in the days, not AZERTY. As a result the only keyboard layout I can use without losing my sanity is a QWERTY US MacBook with a Canadian layout - I have my Q right where I want it, Enter key is lined up in the middle row, # $ % * are there for coding, and all the accents é è à ^ ç are there too. Thank you, Canada.
I suspect its Quebec only
Perhaps, but I really don't know why a French keyboard would be different in Quebec compared to a French keyboard in the rest of Canada. There is a picture of a MacBook keyboard from another poster in this thread, which is what I would expect.
Québec and federal governments.
From a visual perspective I miss some of those more esoteric symbols, but the current Apple (US) keyboard gets it right. Symbols with text labels for modifiers and clear pictographs for the function keys (though the F3/Mission Control icon is a bit unclear until you click i and the behavior of F5/mic seems unhelpful). I just remember a few too many family tech support issues trying to help a struggling relative understand that command and 'open apple' are the same thing.
On the JIS 2003 model, the more traditional Control position is great (it’s how I map my boards) but the Caps Lock positioning is really good too and makes so much sense with how infrequently it’s used. Very little risk of accidentally hitting it. I wonder why more boards haven’t adopted it.
I think the increased use of symbols was because both Europe and Canada are multilingual m, right?
Europe is also a little off here. Different countries use different layouts across Europe.
2008 song about the Apple key by Hot Lava: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts3tLs6xB1U
Also Alt-J, whose logo Δ can be obtained by pressing alt+j on a Mac:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-J
All this micro-management of these standards only serves to confuse people and ultimately causes entry errors and wastes time. Go find the relevant XKCD comic on your own.
I personally miss the Plato IV Plasma Terminal Keyboard - https://codex.retro1.org/plato:tutor:plato_keyboard and http://xahlee.info/kbd/plato_iv_keyboard.html . Those keys on the right with represented many common functions. But the entire keyboard was designed for a future where computers would facilitate many worlds, not just a replacement for a typewriter or calculator.
The weird Canadian helm icon on the Control key caught my eye in particular.
The symbols are from a weird ISO/IEC standard (9995-7 ?) that never really caught on except in a few places. I have seen the lock-key symbols more often on lock light panels than on keycaps.
I recall seeing that on typewriters when i was a kid (in the 90s). I dont know if i ever saw it on a computer keyboard.
> You turned it sideways. Using a colon, a dash, and a parenthesis character in series, you could make a sideways smile or frown. It looked like this: [happy-face] or [sad-face]
Did the editor repace :) with [happy-face]?
??? This isn’t on the linked page.
Wrong thread. The correct one is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49767371
Maybe the author uses a CMS that's supposed to replace tags like [happy-face] with an emoji, but something broke?
I enjoyed the post, but it always bothers me when tech people don't know the difference between Return and Enter.
Panic, for example, gets this right. In Transmit, pressing Return connects to a server. Pressing Enter enters rename mode.
I wonder why people stopped adding symbols to ASCII. The number row on Macs is just these characters:
And every programming language uses a subset of these. But why these symbols? Why didn't people add more symbols to the keyboard?Many European layouts do have more symbols outside ASCII. For example German has ° (degree) and ß (ess-tset) and § (paragraph). German PC keyboards also tend to have µ on the M key, but it is available with the right Alt key.
Macintosh keyboard layouts tend to have many symbols on Option-combinations but they are not always printed.
ASCII is a 7-bit code, so there are only so many symbols one can add. Prior to ASCII, you had codes that used as few as 5 bits. Early C had the option to use digraphs to represent various forms of parenthesis, simply because symbols like {} and [] were not universal.
(Strictly speaking, people did continue adding symbols. We used to talk about code pages: when the MSB was 0, the other 7 bits were ASCII. When the MSB was 1, the other 7 bits were a user selected code pade.)
ASCII is 7-bit and fully filled out. Every other extended character system prior to Unicode was sporadically supported. C has digraphs and trigraphs because even the ASCII punctuation wasn't guaranteed to be available on all keyboards. IBM, notably had an APL typeball for their Selectric derived terminals but that was equivalent to switching character sets and not something that could be considered universal prior to Unicode.
>And every programming language uses a subset of these.
You might like https://juliamono.netlify.app/#fnref:zscode