Doing the apple dance

When computers were still trying to figure out what they were and keyboards were proprietary affairs, different manufacturers did different things for deleting. Many treated the DELETE/DEL/← keys as a left-delete, mimicking the mechanical left-aligned typewriter. A Last-In-First-Out stack of characters. It just fit in with the typing schema. Others had a Backspace key. Yet others had two DEL keys, one left and one right as it became evident that a right-delete was useful too.

It was the wild west of keyboard design… Debates raged. Lives were put on the line. Backspace or Delete? What should it do? What is a cursor? Where should it go?

What a load of crap, Nixta, stop spouting. The short of it is that just as Sinclair, Commodore, Acorn, Atari, Amstrad and Texas Instruments all found themselves writing their own software and building their own hardware, they invented their own keyboard layouts.

By the time the modern PC’s keyboard was reasonably standardised, there was both a Backspace and Delete key (indeed the Apple II had no Delete, just a Backspace). Incidentally, the Backspace key is horribly misnamed. It doesn’t move the cursor back a space as it would on a typewriter, it deletes the character to the left. But never mind.

As a PC user you get very used to the Backspace and Del keys. Even laptops have them both.

Modern Mac laptops do not. They just have a “delete” key, which does what a PC Backspace key does: left-delete.

However, Mac OS X can handle both left and right-deletes. The absence of a dedicated key shouldn’t stop you.

There are two, no, three possible solutions and one nerdly impossible one:

1. Use an Apple wired keyboard (not a wireless one). This has both left-delete and right-delete keys, just like a 103-key PC keyboard (or I suppose you could just use one of those). That defeats the purpose of a laptop though.
2. Use fn-delete, the Mac OS shortcut for right-delete.
3. Install DoubleCommand, a free bit of software that re-assigns certain keys for you. I have it set up to use the ‘\’ key (just below the ‘delete’ key on a Mac Laptop) to behave as right-delete.
4. Not for mere mortals, or indeed anyone who knows what the outside world is like: Create a keyboard file that redefines your keyboard as you want it.

View in High Def

Tags: backspace, delete, keyboard

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 5th, 2008 at 6:42 pm and is filed under Naviation, OS, Usage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.