Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 2: The Mac side (unsung.aresluna.org)

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.

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.

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)

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 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.

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.

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...

Enter appropriated the same “arrow returning” symbol long ago, and the key is colloquially known more often as Enter these days.

I suspect its Quebec only

Québec and federal governments.

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 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.

I worked at the provincial government as an intern. We had those keyboards.

I'm willing to bet that more than 99% of the Canadian Multilingual CSA keyboards on PCs are used by public servants. There is another (French Canadian)layout that is much more common among consumers.

Of course, the Mac side is different, having somehow chosen to align with the (IMO superior) CSA layout.

Europe is also a little off here. Different countries use different layouts across Europe.

Also Alt-J, whose logo Δ can be obtained by pressing alt+j on a Mac:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-J

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.

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.

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.)

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.

>And every programming language uses a subset of these.

You might like https://juliamono.netlify.app/#fnref:zscode

ASCII is, as people have pointed out, a 7-bit code, so it can hold only 128 characters. When they added _ and ^ to it in 01967, they had to remove the ← and ↑ characters from ASCII-1963⁂. So there was no space for any of the characters —–“”×÷£°†‡¢§•€, which are absolutely critical even for English. "National variants" of ASCII might allocate space to some of them, or to other characters like ñ which are even more critical to the languages that use them.

If you're interested in how ASCII ended up that way, Tom Jennings wrote an excellent history: https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/CharCodeHist/index...

Of course, larger character sets that include ASCII as a subset do keep adding symbols: https://www.unicode.org/alloc/Pipeline.html and some programming languages do use non-ASCII symbols: https://docs.raku.org/language/operators

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⁂ Smalltalk's continued use of ASCII-1963, among other things so that it could use ← as the assignment operator, is the reason that OO programmers got in the habit of using CamelCase, and are still doing so today, despite using a character set containing the underscore, and, typically, programming languages in which underscores are valid characters

Maybe the author uses a CMS that's supposed to replace tags like [happy-face] with an emoji, but something broke?

??? This isn’t on the linked page.