Take a good hard look at your keyboard. Right Now.
Ignoring the symbols themselves, although there’s a good long rant as to just why the pipe symbol (‘|’) has to be a shifted key, there’s quite a few oddities on the keyboard. At least if you get a chance to think about it. Not so much in what they do, but in their names.
- BackSpace
- If you are old enough to remember typewriters, printing terminals, or even certain exotic terminals which implemented “backspace” properly, this label is always a bit grating. Why? Because a backspace does not delete anything, but is a way of overwriting symbols to generate other symbols – you could always write a cent symbol by entering ‘c’ followed by a backspace and finally a ‘|’ to get a ¢What we see when we press the backspace key today could be more accurately described as ‘delete last character’, or rubout (as used on some old keyboards). So the backspace key should really be the “Rubout” key.
- Delete
- And whilst we’re in the region of deleting characters, what about the “delete” key? What is it supposed to be deleting? The character under the cursor ? The word under the cursor ? The line? The next line? Well we know what it is, but that is no reason not to make the key legend more explicit.What about “Delete Next” ? This gives an alternative for “Rubout” as “Delete Prior”.
- Enter/Return/Carriage Return
- Again, if you go back to the distant past and dig out an old clunky typewriter you will find a large key at the right of the keyboard that would cause the roll containing the paper that the letters were printed onto, to shoot back to the right [corrected] and move up one line. This was the carriage return. And of course it makes no sense for our modern keyboards to have a key labeled after a physical action that no longer exists.Some have a key labeled “Enter” in addition to “Return” (or sometimes instead of “Return”), but what does that mean? Enter what? The next line? There have been keyboards in the past with a more sensible “New Line” key, but that trend did not take.
Does it not make more sense to label the key after what it does rather than it’s historical purpose? What do we use the “Return” key for these days? Well it’s either to start a new paragraph, or to do the command we have just typed (into a command-line shell). So what about “New Paragraph/Do” ?
- Alt Gr
- Also known as Alt Graphics which originally was a key for composing box graphics, but is now used for producing alternate graphemes from the keyboard such as ©, ™, Ä, etc.
Or perhaps more explicitly, it produces symbols that be produced by the keyboard normally not available.So why not simply label the key after what it produces? Such as “Symbols” ? - The “splat” (Windows)
- There are two problems with the Windows key. Firstly why is it an icon when the rest
of the keys are text-based? It is not as if the other non-symbol keys do not have suitable “icons” such as ⎇ for Alt. Use either icons or text; personally I prefer text.Secondly there is the problem that the Windows key is specific to Microsoft Windows; even within Apple’s perfumed prison, the tendency has been to move from vendor-specific (open Apple symbol) to generic (“Command”).That is not to say that it is a poor idea in general – there is a lot to be said for a key to be used for generating short-cut commands to control the computer as a whole. A “computer command” key as opposed to an “application command” key (or “Alt”).
There are a few other oddities too, and it is quite possible that I will get back and update this post with incoherent rantings about those too.