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Journal ryanr's Journal: Typing with gloves on 17

Journal by ryanr

OK, I see none of you know where to find a copy of "So Much love" either. Fine then.

So, I haven't noticed much about the Slashdot change. That's because I'm trying to use a Mac as my daily desktop, and everything has looked different for a couple of days anyway. You may recall the screen on my XP laptop got cracked. While I haven't done anything in particular with that machine yet, I needed a new machine for my web browsing, email and such.

I had work buy me an iBook a while back so I had something to get familiar with OS X on. It's the ~$1000 refurb iBook G4 1Ghz. I never used it much, because another guy at work ended up doing all the Mac product QA for me. I'm in charge of QA for the company, and since he was doing work for me, I just kept bribing him with Mac hardware, and he kept doing a great job.

To shorten the story up a bit, I grabbed the iBook back from him (I got him a Titanium Powerbook a while ago as a replacement anyway), and I've spent the last couple of days trying to make it useable for myself.

So far, I'm really, really frustrated. It appears that over that last 20-odd years of using DOS and Windows, I've gotten really used to a lot of keyboard shortcuts and other relatively minor differences, but they really add up. I feel like I'm typing with gloves on. It would be like if I were to start trying to drive a stick shift I've only ever driven automatics. I'm typing something, and errrt, stall. I'm quite used to pretty much unconciously translating what I want to do in my head through my hands and into Windows. Some of my habits go back even to Wordstar on CP/M.

It's not like I haven't used 30 different operatings systems, and still do. But it's different when it's my casual desktop.

Examples: PG-UP, PG-DN, HOME & END keys. They scroll the document, but they don't move the freakin cursor. So if I want to jump to the top of a text editor, I have to HOME, and then go all the way to the trackpad, and click the cursor there. ARGH!

That means I can't shift-END to highlight the rest of the line. Oh, and END doesn't go to the end of the line, it goes to the end of the document... etc.

And DELETE isn't a delete key, it's backspace. At least it's in the right spot on the kb.

And why are the function keys not the main function of that key, and I have to use the fn key to activate it, and the main function is things like volume control? I know a little bit of this is because it's a laptop kb, but still.

OK, so a lot of my keyboard shortcuts are similar, just apple key instead of ALT, fine.

Why isn't Thunderbird more consistent? Why can't I still use Ctrl-T to check for new mail? Why doesn't ctrl-enter send the mail? I don't think those are Windowsisms...

It's painful using apple-C and apple-V for cut-and-paste. I normally use ctrl-ins and shift-ins. I don't even have a INS key here. Gimmie my INS key.

How do I pop the current directory from the shell in Finder? I do "start ." in Windows. I do that ALL THE DAMN TIME.

Why, when a window has been minimized, and I use apple-tab to switch to that app, does the window not pop back up? Why else do you think I switched to that app, dumbass!

Why does xterm ALWAYS pop to the background when I switch to X?

Yes, as far as I'm concerned, the "right" way to do it is DEFINED by how Windows does it. I've known for 15 years that the "best" way to do it is the way you already know how. That became real clear to me when I had to help switch a few thousand people from DOS Word Perfect to Windows & Word back in the day.

How long did it take me to get used to Word? I don't think I was a happy camper then, either.

Bitch whine moan.

So yeah, you may see some lazyweb posts out of me looking for advice from Mac users.

Edit:
And another thing: I've been ctrl-clicking on stuff all day. You know what that means? That means you should have put a right mouse button on here, asshat!

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Typing with gloves on More

Typing with gloves on

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  • Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday September 23, 2005 @01:46AM (#13627278)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • That's something I have been pondering, so thanks very much for providing the pointers for me. In the past, I have been a little reluctant to rely too much on customizing my environment, for worry that that's the only way I would learn it. So that when I sat down in front of someone else's Mac, I wouldn't be able to get around. That's an old habit from my tech support days, when I would have to touch a couple dozen machines per day. I dont really do that anymore. I think I'm going to be trying to "fix"

  • Switching environments (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Tet ( 2721 ) <slashdot@a s t r a d y n e . c o.uk> on Friday September 23, 2005 @05:05AM (#13627758) Homepage Journal
    Yes, as far as I'm concerned, the "right" way to do it is DEFINED by how Windows does it.

    Indeed. Having used X almost exclusively for nearly 20 years, to me the "right" way is the way I'm used to doing things under X. That's a lot of learned behaviour to have to unlearn when switching to something else. Obvious examples: focus follows mouse -- or these days, sloppy focus. The ability to lower a window, and to use it without it being top of the pile. Even just the ability to define what happens when you click on various parts of the window border. How Mac and Windows users live without those (and still remain productive) is beyond me[1].

    And another thing: I've been ctrl-clicking on stuff all day. You know what that means? That means you should have put a right mouse button on here, asshat!

    I feel your pain. Oh do I feel your pain. The environment I created for myself some 15 years ago makes extensive use 3 button mice, particularly the middle button. It's getting virtually impossible to even buy a 3 button mouse these days. Even if you happen to find one, you can't do anything meaningful with it outside of X because Windows and OS X won't let you remap what those buttons do. Sigh.

    Am I just resistant to change? Well partly, yes. But partly I just think that the older ways of doing certain things are just better. It's been, what, 20 years since IBM introduced the PC AT? They moved the location of the control key from its rightful place to down in the bottom left hand corner at that time. It was wrong then, and it's still wrong now. I have to remap my keyboard on modern machines so that Ctrl is back where it belongs.

    [1] I suspect the answer is that they're not as productive as they could be, but lacking the comparison with anything better they just don't know it.

    • to me the "right" way is the way I'm used to doing things under X.

      Yes, I never did like the way raw X does it. I've got a habit of shoving the mouse pointer out of the way, which doesn't help things. I'm not even sure what the middle button does, something with cut-and-paste, right?

      The AT was 1984, 21 years ago. I lamented the move of the function keys and ctrl key at the time for a year or two. I got got over than one eventually. I didn't have much choice, all those keyboards went away. Plus, I reall
  • t's painful using apple-C and apple-V for cut-and-paste. I normally use ctrl-ins and shift-ins.

    thats your own fault for using ins. Middle button for paste, baby. :)

    As for the button mice thing, fuck that; get a logitech trackball where the scroll wheel doubles as the middle button. I mean, how can you X without it?!?!?!?! YOU CAN'T. Even a two button mouse is lacking. Its three or take a hike.

    My big issue is window management. I've come to depend upon F11 and I can see me getting used to F9 and F10. I
    • I don't think I ever really got the knack of cut-and-paste under raw X. It seems to work intuitively in KDE and Gnome for me, but that's because they've gone towards the Windows way, isn't it?

      I've only ever gotten remote X to work reliably in all instances when using SSH.

      Yeah, the shell is great. Anywhere I can get real bash, I'm good. (I did finally break down and put cygwin on most of my Windows desktops to get tail, less, grep, et al.) Of course, for a unix, all the directories are wrong, and the HFS
      • I don't think I ever really got the knack of cut-and-paste under raw X. It seems to work intuitively in KDE and Gnome for me, but that's because they've gone towards the Windows way, isn't it?

        Errr, no. It's because that's just the way X works, and has done for at least the last 15 years. See here [jwz.org] for a good description of cut and paste under X.

        • Something is significantly different with cut-and-paste between the recent window managers, and ye olde CDE I've used before. I couldn't tell you what precisely. Let me go read if JWZ knows...
          • Something is significantly different with cut-and-paste between the recent window managers, and ye olde CDE I've used before.

            Cut and paste is handled by applications, not by the window manager, so using a recent window manager will have no effect on its behaviour. However, the CDE apps traditionally used Motif, while most modern apps use either GTK+ or Qt these days, so perhaps there's a difference in the way the toolkits handle it (although I haven't noticed it myself).

    • math in ksh is annoying/don't know how to use bc

      Mathematics in the shell is pretty straightforward these days, but only if you're using integers. It doesn't handle floating point arithmetic:

      leto:~% echo $((3 + 4 / 2))
      5
      leto:~% echo $((5 / 2))
      2

      bc is even easier. It's just a calculator, so use it as such. Just type in an expression and it'll spit out the result. You can script it by piping things into it, too (by default it assumes integers, but you can change that with the scale variable):

      leto:~%

      • Well, in the example I reffered to before, I am dealing with addition of pos and negative floating point numbers. As much as I'd like to round off the cents, the bank just won't front me the cash!
        SO ksh isn't gonna help me but now that I think about it, Perl is pretty fast, loose, and forgiving with math.

        bc is even easier. It's just a calculator, so use it as such.

        Hmmm, that probably explains why I don't get it; I've been trying to use it interactively. Far easier to just pipe it calculator commands.

        ever

      • Yeh, I used to use "bc -q" a lot ... more recently I've changed to using nickle...

        % nickle
        > 5 / 2
        2.5
        > 5 // 2
        2
        > 16!
        20922789888000
        > 16! / 2500
        8369115955.2
    • As for the button mice thing, fuck that; get a logitech trackball where the scroll wheel doubles as the middle button. I mean, how can you X without it?!?!?!?! YOU CAN'T. Even a two button mouse is lacking. Its three or take a hike.
      My problem with that is that it's far too easy to accidentally slip and spin the mousewheel rather than click it, or do both in succession. I do it all of the time using the scroll wheel-click to open links in tabs on Firefox. That said, I'm pretty much addicted to the scrollwh
      • My problem with that is that it's far too easy to accidentally slip and spin the mousewheel rather than click it, or do both in succession. I do it all of the time using the scroll wheel-click to open links in tabs on Firefox.
        That said, I'm pretty much addicted to the scrollwheel. Ever moved to a computer, or an application, which doesn't support it? It pretty much drives you crazy.

        Tell me about it; most X windows apps can't handle it. It is indeed quite maddening.

        HOWEVER! Since most X apps don't support i
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

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