the keyboard

ok so this is probably mostly just an "i'll get used to it eventually" kind of thing but what is up with the zillion modifier keys and the bizzaro key combinations? we've got shift, fn, control, option/alt, and command modifier keys. to check email in thunderbird is shift-command-t. what was wrong with command-m? oh i see, that minimizes the active window, with no way to bring it back without using the mouse. that's useful. NOT!

i'd expect cmd shift M would bring it back. nope.

i'm also not keen on the way windows maximize and resize. how come only the lower righthand corner is a resizing corner? maybe this will just take getting used to also, but what if my window is all the way on the right and i want to expand it to the left a little? i have to drag the whole window from the top to the left then grab the lower right hand corner and drag that to the right.

there is probably an extension or whatever they're called these days that lets you resize windows properly using just the keyboard. i have one on my work pc, its got a full sized keyboard so it works better that way, but on my thinkpad i often maximize a window to work with it and then restore it to window-size when i want to work with something else. if i want to work with two windows i'll size them appropriately so they share screen real estate. this is more difficult on the mac.

but even worse are tall those darn modifier keys! they are all jammed right next to each other too! why have two cmd keys? why have two alt/option keys? i find myself reaching for cmd-tab a lot, then (because of the foreground issue) reaching for cmd-` to switch among windows and accidentally activating the media pc mode, which makes me wait until it loads and i have to quit it. cmd-esc. boo hoo.

also the confusion among alt/option, control, and command. i want to move back a word in a sentence- the key is option-arrow. i want to delete the previous word, option-delete. no problems there. its just that option is tiny and sandwiched between the larger command and the same sized control keys. i don't know how many times i've intended to alt-arrow but instead cmd-arrow'd instead and changed the webpage i was on.

seriously, these keys aren't used efficiently. you don't need four modifier keys! especially not all jammed in right next to each other like that. two per side would make tons more sense if you really wanted four of 'em. or alternatively make the ones you use more often bigger, and consolidate the functionality.

in terminal i'm often using the control key. but outside of terminal control moves around from workspace to workspace and thats all i've figured out that it does. completely useless. get rid of it. make a new key double wide called control/alt/option and have it do all those functions since there's nary an overlap. use the fn key to switch among desktops. fn-arrow does nothing!

this is simply poor design. the engineers at apple decided to take the easy way out of this one, rather than fix all the different things that might have used these various keys in their various incarnations they just added the keys.

now there are four modifier keys and you only really need two or three. it definitely saved production time but was for darn sure not the "right" way to do this. its not clean, its not tight, its not elegant. go ahead and argue with me, but you know its true. this could've been done well and they slacked. i'm bummed about that.

that and the darn function keys up top. many of them share functionality, like volume or brightness or whatever. i would've rather that they add four new keys up top to handle these always necessary functions (you always want instant access to them) rather than taking over the whole function key row and requiring a modifier to hit those keys.

bah.

i still love the bright screen though. yummy on the eyes. i got yelled at by my friend because i put on a pale sea-green background that matches my windows xp thinkpad background. i find it soothing and not distracting. she almost barfed on me and it was the first thing she wanted to change when she got her mitts on my macbook.

i will get bored of it eventually. not yet though.

cheers!