10 Reasons Modern Keyboards are Shit
Photo for illustration purposes only, this ain’t my nasty skanky-ho keyboard
Hi, I’m Rob Manuel and I’ve got a problem with keyboards. A big fucking problem. I can bore for hours on the subject, and so in the small hope that the magic of the internet will get my message to keyboard designers, here’s my rant. Hold onto your hat, it’s going to be a rough ride.
1. Numlock
What is the fucking point of numlock? Why would I ever want to use the numeric keypad as a cursor? Yes I imagine it’s some kind of gay backwards compatibility thing, but it’s just a pain in the arse. The only time I ever press it is by accident and then wonder why the number keys have stopped working.
2. Capslock
Apparently capslock was considered quite useful on typewriters. Probably because TYPING IN CAPS WAS THE ONLY WAY TO DO EMPHASIS. But we have bold now, and the only people who type in caps are the modern green-inkers who send me loony emails about their cats.
Again, it’s a key I press only by accident, normally when filling in a username / password thing, and using tab to change the form focus, missing and end-up adding robmanuelBADGERSEX to the auto-complete. Gah.
Although recently I have found a setting in the control panel to disable the damn thing. Which made me as happy as a pig in shit.
3. Multimedia keys
All those fucking keys at the top of the keyboard. They’re never built like proper keys and always look shoddy and plasticy.
But my problem is more than aesthetics. It’s standardisation. Every last damn keyboard manufacturer has a different idea of what these keys should be doing.
Hence I don’t bother using them as I swap machines a lot between home and offices and don’t want to have conflicting and non-standard keyboard information in my brain. I don’t want to on another PC and automatically stabbing the messenger button, to find it’s opened some shitty sales portal.
And the corporate ego of it all! My old HP keyboard had a internet button that opened the bloody hp.com homepage. What use is that to man or beast? I’ve already bought an HP computer; I don’t need to buy a second.
4. US keyboards
Oh jesus pillocking shit. Who thought it was a good idea to make English and American keyboards different. We speak the same bloody language for gods sake. It’s not like we need a load of twirly umlauts on the keys. The crucial and mind-boggling shit variation is the enter key. On the UK version is nice and large and shaped like an upside down Tetris L brick. The shape is distinctive to the touch and you can easily find it by feel in poor light conditions.
In USA the key is roughly the same shape as the backspace key, with the saved space being used for the backslash / pipe key. Duh, now that’s a brilliant idea isn’t it? Because normal PC operation uses those characters all the time. Probably a hang-over from DOS when your computer was controlled by an arcane series of cryptic symbols. Or small donkeys, I forget now.
5. Colour
Why colour a keyboard cream? Because the manufactures want it to get dirty and you have to buy a new one every three months? Wired magazine once memorably described the gunk as “keyboard plaque”, but the state of some keyboards I’ve seen, it’s more like “keyboard AIDS.” There should be a law that makes all keyboards black. Well, unless you’re a Steve Jobs acolyte and think white keyboards where every bastard button looks like the other is a good idea.
6. Volume control mute
Now, the volume control is one of the few keyboard advancements of recent years that’s a good idea. Using a PC has become a noisy activity, but sometimes you need to answer the phone and being able to quickly hit mute without fiddling with the mouse rocks.
But the small problem is that the mute key often works after the PC is fully booted, meaning that the system “whoosh” noise will play regardless.
Which means using my laptop late at night can wake my family. I’ve taken to keeping an old pair of broken headphones handy so that I can push the jack into the speaker socket and re-route the nasty noises.
7. Sleep button
I’m highly suspicious of the sleep button. In principle it’s great, but I had such a bad experience with the sleep mode crashing the PC and losing my work that I don’t trust it. At least on the recent Microsoft keyboards it’s in the far right corner and difficult to hit by accident. On my old HP keyboard it was place just above the ESC key and I’d hit it when trying to stop a webpage loading, and then go “Argh! My PC is going to die! Don’t die, little computer.”
8. Non-standard insert block
The Microsoft keyboard design team are clearly back on the crack pipe. First they made the insane “natural” keyboard that split the keyboard into two chunks for touch typists. And secondly they’ve recently re-designed the insert block.
Why? All it means is I’m constantly pressing the wrong keys when I try and navigate documents via pagedown and home keys.
I’m sure they did some lovely usability study and worked out it was more efficient or something, but for fucks sake, don’t muck with the standards. I know how to use the old one and don’t want to learn a new one. Haven’t you learnt anything from those crappy Dvorak keyboards that attempted to persuade people to abandon qwerty?
9. Legs
What is the point of giving a keyboard legs? Yes keyboards are more pleasant to type on with a small tilt, so why not simply make the keyboard shaped like a wedge of cheese? It’s a particular sore point for me as I’ve thrown away perfectly good keyboards after accidentally snapping one of the pathetic spindly plastic legs.
10. Function keys
Grr. Another Microsoft “innovation.” On recent keyboards they’ve move the function keys from blocks of four to blocks of three. I can see what they’re trying to achieve here. Visually three is a better shape to help aid the memory: something is either on the left, the middle or the right. However, again this move away from standards results in me pressing the wrong key. For example I regularly press F5 to refresh an internet page, which my brain has hard-wired to know it’s the first key of the second block. Microsoft has moved it to the second key of the second block, hence I now keep keep pressing F4 and wonder why nothing is happening.
… 2 Bonus reasons, there’s no stopping now …
11. F Lock
Oh damn your eyes Microsoft. Is nothing sacred any more? You’re taking my function keys and replacing them with some bollocks about “New, Open and Close”? Ok, the F Lock turns all this off and it stays off which in theory is fine. Except they’ve made the (rather useful for screen grabs) PrtScn key only work whilst F Lock is off. Hence to grab a screen now I have to press three keys instead of one. Nice one, you bunch of keyboard bastards.
12. Wireless
What’s this obsession with making everything wireless? Yes having your laptop connecting to the internet whilst you take a dump in the bog is one of the marvels of the technological age. However we don’t need wireless keyboards on the desktop. I recently was nosing around PC world and except for a shitty £5.00 made of crap thing, that’s all they were selling.
For fucks sake. It’s not an innovation to stick batteries in a keyboard. It’s a pain in the anus. I don’t want to stop typing because my keyboard is out of batteries, it’s just fucking insane.
End bit
Now that I’ve ranted, I really do feel much better. Carry on, as you were. Or why not look on Flickr for some kittens?
UPDATE - Hello to the Digg / Fark readers, and the other blogs linking my rant. BTW: I’ve got a book out, and it’s very rude.
Sorry, the point i ommited to mention in that essay back there was – I need a wireless keyboard and mouse because i DON’T work at a desk in my room. I work from my bed ;-P
Yours blatantly,
- Drewyd
It’s time we started to mobilize our rants and raves people.. I’m a programmer of 15 years, former FPS gamer (keyboards were part of the reason I stopped) and basically an all-around computer user since I was 4 years old on my wee Atari 800XL. Someone has to have the will to tell these bastards what we really want; a good old comfortable keyboard that doesn’t mash our fingers together, make it impossible to locate keys, or end up screwing us over with extranneous crap keys like “Sleep” or “Menu”.
Honestly, on every keyboard I use I have physically disabled the Insert key. It has never been used by me, ever. I remap Caps Lock to tab, so it doesn’t matter which button I hit. I do the same trick for other keys, like that horrible american placement of the backslash/pipe key above Enter. God, I miss my wonderful ergo AT-style keyboard. Loud as a freight train when I was typing at 100WPM but at least I could work with that thing.. now I can’t even plug it into a modern machine without some corny-looking dongle.
Annoyances: at work, I type in a lot of figures. So why-oh-why isn’t there a comma key on the numeric keypad? The only computer with the foresight to include this was the, er, BBC Master…
Other annoyances: on Macs, why do I have to press Opt-3 go get a hash (#) character? If I was a programmer, this would be bloody annoying. I can solve this by getting a US-sold Mac, but then the pound character (£) would be relegated to Opt-3. Grr. And how do I clean this keyboard? White, with transparent bits, it currently contains nearly four years of collected shite. Well, not literal shite… I think…
I guess I just dont know the uber almight mac. But in windows based machines, you can just go in and turn off the startup / shutdown / or event all sound events. Or you can choose other sound based themes to cover any sound alert message.
I guess theres one thing for the PC :)
I fucking hate keyboards with 3 Windows keys. There’s no excuse for having more than one. Futhermore, the windows keys tend to be positioned so that they’re way too easy to hit during gaming, bumping you out of the game and to the desktop while your character gets killed.
Back in the System 7 days and before, F1-F4 mapped to the Edit menu controls: Undo, Cut, Copy, Paste. Damn useful. And I’ve got to say, the absolute best keyboard I’ve ever used is my Apple Extended Keyboard, which I currently have hooked up to 2 PCs via an ADB-USB adapter and a KVAM switch. It’s even got an = key on the numpad, tho that doesn’t work in Windows. I’m kinda curious what the power button will do if I press that. Haven’t tried it yet.
Very good points. I think the insert key should be added though. Its fucking pointless.
You can disable to start up and shut down noises you know.
Start / Settings / Control Panel / Sounds and Audio Devices / Sounds Table / under program events find find the name Start WIndows and select None under sounds, aply all, ok and restart.
Or
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\AppEvents\Schemes\Apps\.Default\SystemStart\.Current]
@=hex(2):00,00
To all of you who hate the sleep key on the keyboard, I can go one better.
Just below the delete key, about 4mm below it, on this keyboard I have a power key. That’s right, everytime I delete something without paying attention I run the risk of shutting down my whole computer. One little slip and “Oops! I hope you saved those recent changes to your work, because nothing’s stopping it from being lost now!” If this keyboard wasn’t black, wired, had F-lock and was more than £8 I would have returned it.
Also, what the hell is the use of sticky keys? Hold shift for a few seconds and suddenly get a function that completely fucks up program interface that’s not easily changed, especially useful when you’re talking to your girlfriend on msn and suddenly you can’t type anything that’s not in caps and can’t actually send a message because enter is now permanently coupled with shift so all pressing enter does is make a new line rather than send. Could only get out of it with a restart, by which time the gf had logged off after I had a rousing effort to try and communicate this fact to her across a webcam. I could murder the person who made that function.
Numlock is the one that annoys me, at university seemingly every computer has it turned off for some inexplicable reason, so whenever I go to use the number pad (which is much nicer to use than a row across the whole keyboard when you are trying to enter a load of numbers) I get that confused moment before I realise that numlock has been hit again.
Insert annoys me too, especially with keyboards without the wee lights to tell you the status, you get halfway through an essay, go back to retype a bit and then found out due to some enterprising arsehole that changed it, you have gone and typed over the last three lines of text and have to try and remember what the hell they were int he first place…
Wireless keybaord on the other hand are most necessary, as I generally type on my computer from across the room where the wire won’t reach… eh? the mouse I can understand, but the keyboard isnt exactly the most mobile piece of hardware, it sits on my desk where the cable is hidden out of the way where nobody cares about it
bring on the optimus keyboard – http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus/
Whose stoopid idea was it to put the caps lock key on the left end of the middle line, where the CTRL key is on every other computer in the world, and vice versa?
To type a € on a UK keyboard, simply press Right-alt and 4. Not sure why that’s useful. As for control vs. caps lock, I learned to compute on a DEC VT-100 terminal, which has control and caps lock swapped over. So I turned caps lock off on my PowerBook, and now I’m happy. But what’s the deal with the difference between a standard UK keyboard, like this one on Mrs. God’s PC, and the “UK” keyboard on my (otherwise utterly lovely) PowerBook. Blooming quote marks are down where they are on a US keyboard, and a “#” sign is something like command-3. As a programmer (hey, Kid Penfold), this is teh suck!
To be honest, thanks to Windows giving you a US keyboard pretty much irrespective of how often you tell it you’re in the UK, I’ve just learned to type on a US keyboard, as it works across most machines.
I’m waiting for the day that I can just plug myself in to the computer and think the symbols I want.
I hate the split keyboard and what the hell where they thinking with F lock? I got to refresh a webpage at school so I press F5 that does something completely different. It’s a pain in the arse with US and UK English kayboard cos you don’t know where all the buttons are. I got to email someone and I get # instead of @.
How the hell do you even get the ¦ from the ¬`¦ key? I get ` when I press it without shift, ¬ with shift, but how do you get ¦
All I can say is that whoever designed the Sleep (and power/shut down buttons on some keyboards) never owned a cat.
oh and caps/num lock shouldn’t exist
as for the little plastic feet that most keyboards have- At work we have a supply of foam wedges that we use with every keyboard because even those feet don’t raise it enough if you work with a computer every day. Try putting something under your keyboard to raise the back end by 2/3″ and see how much better it is.
*that’s* why my numbers weren’t working!!!
and too right about the wireless tosh – on the mouse front always having to raid my vibrator for some AAs is getting a bit tiresome…
The Apple white keyboard is so nice to type on. I hear you on Caps Lock and I guess Num Lock is kind of redundant – but there’s many a Linux distro which doesn’t have it set to ON by default – so you’re stuck if you can’t turn it on and your log-in pass-phrase has numbers in it.
ok, firstly
“The CAPSLOCK is +/- mandatory in engineering …… unless you’re in or near the field you wouldn’t know. ”
Yeah well i’m no engineer but if i was then what i’ld do is type it all normaly so it didn’t hurt my brain to look at then i’ld select ‘Convert to Caps’ and let my wordprocessor do the magic.
I must admit tho that i use the CAPS lOCK to troll in #Irc chat rooms;)
As for them being white, who cares if they get a little dirty when you can draw all oven them; self cleaning too – even permenent marker soon gets eroded by finger grease.
As for wireless, why would you remove the most usefull function from a product especialy if in doing so it severly hamped the products opperation? Sometime’s i missplace my mouse for a moment or i knock it off the table into the knee deep rubble from what ever project i’m working on at the time but it’s never a hassle because there is a wire going from my base unit stright to it, all i need do is tug on that wire and woosh like magic my mouse is returned!
Occasionaly when i press buttons nothings happens, have i pulled the plug out? I ask myself, why yes i have and we pop the plug in the hole and it’s al fixed. simple, are the batteries run out? is it too far away? has the signal got confused and will i have to spend the next ten minuets pressing buttons and configering airwolf style brain signals?
one more quick wireless worry, why would i rather have raised levels of electromagnetic transmojaz brainwaves zapping all over my house then a neat little cable running up my desk and into my computer? It’s lead in paint, asbestos in roofs, antifreeze and mercuary in baby’s vaxinations, it’s sleeping on a hard floor with a bad back. Why do we fall for it everytime some crack pot scientist tells us that ‘of cource its safe, we haven’t got any evidence of it haming people at all; of cource we haven’t looked but we’re sure if we did then we wouldn’t find any….’
but i need a wireless kb so i can lay on my bed……bah. wll I currently have my wired board on my knees, a little later i might lay on my bed with it – i know exactly how far i can take it so if i want to play a bit of quake or something i don’t need to worry that my g key isn’t responding because i’m too far away. like i say if i loose it, its easy to find.
wireless is senseless
Oh and like da man says; if you’ve got some crazy rare character you need to use then ascii codes are the way!!! ∞f”├X┴!P≡♫=↔▲!¡‼
I ripped ‘sleep’,'off’,and’restart’ out with piliars after one too many random power downs
only thing you’re right about is the UK/US and F lock
At work we have a severely outdated IBM system for handling customer finance applications. The keyboard is bloody barmy on it – the enter key is where control should be. There are about 50 “F” keys. the arrows are all higgledy piggledy.
It’s a fucking nightmare.
To make it worse, the system itself has a commandline interface with black background and green text. Seriously, it’s the crappest thing ever!
I still miss all the old IBM and ICL\keyboards, that all used to come with a bag about the size of a bag of sugar, with all of the other language keys included and a tool to remove all of the keys as well, In the box you’d get a booklet with all of the standard keyboard layouts so you could put them back together after you’d swapped the keys round on your mates. also made them dead easy to clean. the last great advantage was they were so solid and heavy that they felt like they’d been made as surplus from disposed of battleships.
Ah – thought this was going to be a rant about the kind of keyboards that make music, about piano action vs semi-weighted vs synth action. I tend to feel more confident with semi-weighted at least, even better when it’s a fully-weighted piano action.
This is because you a) your finger has a soft landing, b) you have feedback on the stroke, you are under no doubt that you have actually hit a key. I had the same feeling when a colleague brought an old IBM PC keyboard to the office: you had to make a positive movement to strike a key, and you could feel the click from the spring as it cushioned the stroke. The action was modeled after the IBM Selectric typewriter, and I wish I had one of those at home.
It was too loud for the office though, and I’ve found a 15-year-old Compaq that is not quite as obnoxious. But you’re right, with a slight qualification: modern keyboards are disposable shite. Don’t get me started on notebooks with the “clitmouse”… grrr.
Wireless mice are essential. Nothing’s more irritating than having to untangle your cords during Counter Strike.
“What is the fucking point of numlock? Why would I ever want to use the numeric keypad as a cursor?”
Obviously you’re haven’t been a geek for long…
I’ve been using the keypad for navigation since the times when you didn’t have those stupid arrows keys (WHY IS DOWN NOT ON THE BOTTOM????)
And thinking of it, why would you want to enter NUMBERS from the keypad?! You work in fucking supermarket?!? Whats wrong with the good old number keys??
F lock SUCKS. It’s the only thing I don’t like about my keyboard. Every time I want to printscreen, I always hit PrtScn, F-Lock, PrtScn. AND The other function of the Print Screen button is INSERT. The most annoying key ever invented.
Many years ago (14), I worked as a CAD designer, using microstation (fuck off autocad!), and the key boards had 48 function keys, each with a sub-function, 96 of the bastards to learn! Luckily you could define them yourself and print out a card that slipped above the keys with a description or picture of what each key did.
With the number mini keyboard, and the numlock key, you can control most all aspects of older banking software. Just because you don’t use it, doesn’t mean it’s worthless.
Same for caps lock.. using all capital letters is required for some older programming/mainframe systems.
The legs are there to make tilting your keyboard an OPTION. Most of us keep them down, because tilting it increases risk of carpal tunnel. Which I hope you get.
Anyway, I hate new keyboards because they are too soft. I want to know when I press a button, damn it. Where is the feedback?!?!
Also… I admit that I use the Windows key + D to show my desktop, but other than that, I’m pissed that every keyboard now has it and the left click menu button.
/I want an old IBM model M
//My roommates would kill me if I got one (buckling spring keyboards are VERY VERY loud, and I’m an insomniac)
Smalvin – unfortunatly, the word processor isn’t an option most times. These things are being typed directly into a second program, such as a CAD system, or a costing/ estimating system.
I would still like to see it go, and just have the programs change.
Just buy a standard 104-key keyboard and shut the fuck up.
I just wish they would make the ENTER key the same on all keybaords
Flock is the only thing that drives me insane because its off when I start computer. I want to on so I can use my damn F keys
Run linux and youll find the caps lock, pipe key and others very very usefull.
Numlock is great just for the light on the keyboard, .. you can determine if a machine has hardlocked by tapping the numlock key. If it blinks you’re good, .. if it doesnt… bounce the box.
Looks like you had had it with keyboards :D
buying a keyboard became a gambling activity nowadays and i admit that
in every single peace you will find a different hurdle to make your syay on the PC a nightmare
You forgot to mention the windows key. Useless piece of gear that is. Worst part about it is that if you play video games, the standard “first person shooter” layout will guarantee you graze it at least once during a critical moment and end up flipping to the desktop. The worst part is that Ctrl esc does the exact same thing, so why have an extra key for it?
Scroll lock is pointless (only app that uses it is Excel). So is Pause/Break. So remove them two and replace with copy/paste.
How do I reprogram my keyboard?
Now that the kids are off my lawn and my hip fracture is fixed. Let me fix you a glass of Geritol while we talk.
Pause/Break – Hold over from early mainframes ie:3270. Back in DOS it’s the equivalent of control-P which would pause text on screen.
SysRq – Added with the IBM AT 6 MHZ PC. Was/Is supposed to have a direct line into the CPU, hence system request key. I can’t say I’ve ever seen it used but I have played with it using X86 Assembler back in the day. Possibly still a solution in search of a problem.
Weird characters – that sideways looking “L” thingy, it is a logical NOT symbol. I’ve seen them on 3270 terminals before, maybe 5150 (AS 400) too. Yeah, I am as old as dirt and actually programmed on punch cards.
Well the Alzheimers is kicking in, time to take a nap. Hey you, get off my lawn you kids show no respect these da…..zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
I like caps lock so much that I took it from the keyboard altogether. Now I have a big hole there, where I can keep souvenirs of my past meals and beard hairs.
#4 – Tetris Return: The standard return key (which I believe Apple has been using since 1979) is much preferred over the tetris return key. Many cheap PC keyboards would use the tetris return key layout and it sucked. The fact that the size of the standard return key and delete key are “similar” has *never* resulted in me hitting the wrong key. I personally think the tetris return key layout should be outlawed.
#9 – Legs: Apple’s new keyboards do exactly as you ask, no legs, just a slightly titled arrangement of keys.
#10 – Function Keys: More and more OS’s are overloading the keyboard. Apple offers up a (Fn) key on their laptops. I would also like to see a (Usr) modifier key added to provide the end-user with their own key space for hot keys. Hot Key tools are worth much if the OS has taken away all your key combinations.
What’s that damn “Sys Req” key do anyway? It’s been there since DOS days, and I don’t think it did anything even then.
And speaking of DOS days – remember those nice old beefy PC keyboards with the nice touch, solid spring action and real electrical contacts? You could spill your coffee on them, rinse them off and dry them out in front of the heater duct, and they’d be good as new. Nowadays, keyboards have those stupid mylar sheets with contacts on them that instantly wick up fluid and give you all kinds of bizarre results when you hit a key. One misplaced splash, and you have to throw the thing out. Grr…
The big splits in the “natural” keyboards are best used, I think, by people like me who have Neanderthal-sized hands that can’t fit next to each other on a standard keyboard.
I miss the large, L-shaped Enter keys as well.
Ahh I miss my model M. I had one for my 486. Bless.
I like wireless keyboards; they can be stashed in drawers during house parties to stop pissed up people spilling drinks over them…
I like my keyboards to be nice and weighty as well, have to hear the keys click. Drives my housemates mad at 3am. I also have to eat with fairly heavy cutlery or I get all upset about my food.
Every so often I take my keyboard apart and disinfect every single key with dettol.
I think I mght have OCD :D
I have got my first laptop a year ago and i loved it so much cause there are no gaps between keys which my fingers almost always went in pressing multiple keys. That gap is as big as a key and seems pointless. Now every time i don’t type on my laptop i screw the fuck up. I am tried to get use to the gaps and now i don’t make as many mistakes when i type but it still happens every few sentences which still pisses me off.
What is the fucking point of numlock? Why would I ever want to use the numeric keypad as a cursor?
Until I switched to the Mac, I felt the complete opposite.
Arrow keys on many PC keyboards are absolutely hideous (the ‘mini’ keys on the old Microsoft Naturals, being the worst).. and using the arrows on the number pad gives a FAR nicer hand position since your hand is in a more natural typing position, rather than crouched at the bottom of the keyboard.
This was pretty important when you were a developer in the 1980s/1990s when GUI IDEs were not as common and you had to pretty much live with arrows all day.
To counter, though, what the fsck is the point of the numeric pad itself? You have numbers above the QWERTY line for gawd’s sake. Even though arrows don’t work on Mac keyboards, I never use the keypad since typing on the regular number keys is way more comfortable, being in a normal typing position (no need to move hands all the way across the keyboard).
but then again, what is more troubling in this day and age – the scroll lock buttons or programmers/software that just can’t show a page at a time and has to scroll and scroll …
and yes – until those 5 freaks that use caps lock on MAINFRAMES ain’t dead, the rest of humanity must suffer …
same with bankers – no way they could just attach a small num pad to normal keyboard … no, there’s a small banker in all of us …
i myself actually would prefer a big, soft ENTER button instead of all that num pad area on extended keyboards … so that you could hit it with a hand, with the force … and maybe similarly sized ESC key on the left side :)
A few years ago, I published a simple Windows key killer registry mod.
It kills Left Windows, Right Windows, Menu, Power, Sleep, and Wake.
http://krellan.livejournal.com/24069.html
Works great and looks better than ripping the keys out with pliers :)
Krellan (typing this on a 20-year-old Model M keyboard that lacks these keys completely)
I cant stand the f cking key it never f cking works. It’s a real pain in the rect m. Why cant they invent a lang age that doesn’t need an arsing key.
An ont get me starte on the f cking key….
;)
Don’t forget to mention all the international variaties. Layouts much worse then the US-keyboard layout don’t allow you access to all characters. Which is stupid to me. The time has long gone where one types just one language. I need a layout that allows access to all, some way or the other!
The insert key is a dread, should be Ctrl+Insert to achieve what it does. Ctrl+Insert already has a function? Well just learn to use Ctrl+V. Any educated person does.
The recipy for CAPS is the same: Ctrl+CAPS would do nicely. Then move it to some silly position to be forgotten about and use the space. Notebooks keyboards should use that space, but no. They make the cursor keys small instead.
Same old brainless world that suddenly surprises you when you thought it as dead.
Next on the plate: Microsoft will invent reconfigurable keys with LCD’s indicating the current function.
I love my new keyboard. A plain-as-hell black Logitech OEM $5 ten-year-old bog standard plastic brick. Equally suitable for clubbing a man to death as it is for typing without all the bollocks.
My Apple keyboard solves many of the problems that you have mentioned here. For example, there is no num locks; the keyboard is like a wedge, no legs; no sleep button either. It is also a nice white and very durable so far.
On my iBook, the mute button will stop the startup sound, but not on my iMac. I am not really sure why.
Also, I use CAPSLOCK quite often typing, but I do agree it could perhaps be moved a little. It is not only used for emphasis, but for acronyms and such.
You do realise that the UK also has an unstandard keyboard layout too, right? The only standardised keyboard layout is English International, which is what I use. The UK version does move around a lot of puncuation in places that do not make sense in comparison to the US layout. Older keyboards did have the “L” shaped Enter/Return button, but not longer I guess.
Why are keyboards white? Think about it for a second.
Why isn’t your blog black with white text? Because it would be fucking hard to read, that’s why.
The keys are white with black text for contrast reasons, it makes them easier to read. Not everyone can touch type and if you have to look at the keys all the time it makes sense if you can read them.
Personally, I can’t touch type, and these new black keyboards look cool, with their backlit LED thingys, but they aren’t the easiest thing to read, especially in low light even with the LEDs.
I’m going to be a Mac Fanboy Now you might be intrested to know that Mac OS X dosen’t have a login sound, but also the keybaord is self tilts up also, UK and US keyboards are the same (I need to double check this I know that on PC Keybaord 2 is @ in Us and ” in UK however on a Mac @ in the US and UK)
That was me being a Mac Fanboy although some of it was OS realted. But If you don’t want a Mac don’t buy one :D