Why "Delete" Means Opposite Things on Mac and Windows
Keyboard differences between Windows and Macs
A reference guide to the many keyboard differences between Mac and Windows, covering key names, modifier keys, symbols, shortcut notation, function keys, special character input, and text field navigation. It highlights gotchas for web apps that must support both platforms, such as the Mac's extra Option key and its use for special characters, and Windows' AltGr key for international characters.
What Windows calls Backspace, Mac calls Delete. What Windows calls Delete, Macs call Forward Delete.
- donatj
> What Windows calls ⏎ Enter, Mac calls ⏎ Return. However, Macs also have an ⌤ Enter, although only on a numeric keypad (previously, it was even there on laptops! [1]). On keyboards without the physical Enter key, you can simulate it via Fn+Return.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_G3#/media/File:Apple...
I have spent literally several minutes scanning this keyboard for a physical Enter (as opposed to Return) and have no idea what the author is talking about.
- RobGR
This is a really interesting and complete writeup.
I have been helping someone who has little experience with Windows or Mac, but used DOS for years ( until pretty recently ) and I've set them up with a simple Debian Linux running XFCE4 as the desktop. I've found that I have to teach them and also document a lot of basic computer idioms -- Control-C / X / A / V to copy, cut, select all, paste; but also more basic things, like the fact there are two pointers on the screen -- one for the mouse and one for the keyboard -- if you slide the mouse pointer to a specific point and press a keyboard key, the new key will not appear where the arrow is, it will appear where the text cursor is.
A big one was tabs. I had to get a couple of manilla folders and show them the actual tabs, and hold it up next to the browser with several tabs, and suddenly it snapped with them what the interface was trying to represent.
Control-A will select all of a web page, unless you are in the text entry box of a form, then it selects just the things in that text entry box.
I started writing this up in a little manual, it got to a dozen pages fast, and I haven't put very much in it.
If anyone knows of a place where some portion of all of this is written down, post a link !
- szszrk
> and Macs offer ⌘ Command, ⌥ Option, ⌃ Control, and ⇧ Shift
This is traumatizing for me. I tried to switch to a mac for home use and failed because of keyboard handling. Using Polish diacritics (made with right alt) wasn't obvious at first. I was able to switch keyboard settings to mimic Linux/Windows, but it's just not there. Control and Command confusion haunts me. I dropped the platform because of this and know a few people who stayed on iphones, but also dropped Macs because of keyboard.
I once tried to "find myself" on linkedin search bar on someone else's Mac. I though "I got this, I'm a mac user now!" and managed to close the browser tab and open some random programs...
I admire people who jump between those platforms. Even more for languages that don't have standardized alphabet mappings, like Bulgarian (it seems they don't have consensus there).
- IgorPartola
Mac got the Command key right. Windows got the Home and End keys right. Wish we could have both on one system.
- bombcar
The delete key thing comes from how Windows descends from DOS which always had the cursor ON a character (blinking box kind of thing) whereas the Mac had the cursor as a thin line BETWEEN characters.
Technically DOS could have had "backspace" (delete the character BEFORE the cursor), "delete" (delete the character on/under the cursor), and "forward delete" (delete the next character AFTER the cursor).
- kqr
> What Windows calls ⏎ Enter, Mac calls ⏎ Return.
I'm not an Apple person at all, but this is one of the hills I die on. The "Enter" key is for entering data, submitting a field, etc. The "Return" key is for returning the carriage, i.e. starting a new line. Importantly, those two are different functions! The only keys that exist twice on the keyboard are modifier keys (Ctrl, Shift, sometimes Super and Alt). The Return or Enter keys do not need to exist twice. Clearly these are meant to be two different functions, because they are two different keys on the keyboard.
To my wife's annoyance, I teach my children the correct names for these keys.
- theodpHN
In a similar vein, the "Costs of Switching Schoolchildren Between Windows, Chrome, Mac?" (https://slashdot.org/submission/17349696/costs-of-switching-...) begins:
If you've ever made the jump from PC to Mac (or vice versa) at work or home, you're painfully aware that there are very real costs of switching platforms in terms of lost knowledge and productivity. In addition to flushing years of accumulated knowledge down the toilet — goodbye Outlook-Teams-OneDrive-SharePoint-Excel-Word-PowerPoint-VBA, hello GMail-Workspace-GDrive-Sheets-Docs-Slides — there's also the matter of a thousand UI and other "paper cuts" to contend with ("Why are you looking for a 'prt sc' key," condescendingly replies a Mac aficionado in response to a question from a former Windows user, "when Shift+Command+3 is so intuitive?").
- karhuton
Asahi and GNOME teams, please take this as an guide to implement ”Mac input compatibility mode”!
Dual booting between a MacOS and Linux is a painful process of manual keyboard and shorcut overrides to get the linux side somewhat to the (better) mac way of doing this.