My Mac keyboard has taken a bit of adjusting for me, especially coming from Windows. It's not that it's difficult, just that I still spend a lot of time on my Windows machine and moving between the two keyboards can be a bit frustrating at times.The MacBook adds to that challenge because it doesn't have some of the keys that I've become used to having on a full size keyboard. Where the Backspace key is on my Windows machine is a key labeled Delete. It performs the same function as a Backspace key on Windows though - so far so good.
The Delete key on my Windows machines (usually Del since it's a small key) doesn't exist on my MacBook. For the first month or so I accepted that I had to move past a letter and back over it with Delete in order to remove it. I like the fact that my keyboard has keys that have a little space between them - cutting down the key count by not including Del, Page up, Page Down, etc. means that I don't have a cramped keyboard like I do on my other HP laptop. It was a reasonable compromise from my standpoint.
What I just found out though was that I can Delete forward on a MacBook keyboard by holding down the "fn" (Function) key and hitting Delete.
So where are the other missing keys?
| Full Keyboard | MacBook Keyboard |
|---|---|
| Delete (Forward) | fn-Delete |
| Home | fn-Left Arrow |
| End | fn-Right Arrow |
| Page Up | fn-Up Arrow |
| Page Down | fn-Down Arrow |
Happy typing!
16 comments:
If you hold "alt" or "option" and press most other keys you'll get a load of other symbols. The most obvious and most looked for is #, option+3.
not my site
http://www.danrodney.com/mac/index.html
i find it useful
Hey... this is unrelated but something you may want to look into.
If i type: http://davidalison.com/ i get a GoDaddy page. But if i type http://www.davidalison.com/ i get to your box. You may want to check your host setting.
:-)
@Desi: I need to update the DNS setting. I had some problems with that and Blogger before and never bothered to fix it. Forgot about it - thanks for the reminder!
This site has a dashboard widget, character pal that has tons of keyboard short cuts.
http://www.tacowidgets.com/index.php
The whole delete/backspace naming convention goes way back. For some reason, delete on a Mac has always been "make the character behind my cursor go away", and forward delete removes the character ahead of the cursor.
If you go back to pre computer times, the true backspace key on typewriters never erased anything. Instead the function was there to move back one to then be able to type an accent character over the letter you just typed. IE, you would type a [backspace] ' to get รก. This seems to have been examined by the Apple designers, hence they used delete to indicate text would be going away, instead of confusing the backspace key as doing something different then the typewriter key did.
Another interesting split in decisions is the whole ctrl, alt, and (windows/apple) key split. Windows chose to use Ctrl for a lot of GUI shortcuts, even though in the terminal days, Ctrl already was used for a lot of different shortcuts. Ctrl-C for example was never copy at a terminal, it was break execution. Apple used a 3rd modifier key to avoid trampling on terminal commands, while Microsoft only added a third modifier key in Windows 95. Because of it's late entrance into the GUI world, it's never done much beyond trivial tasks, where as the entire Mac OS GUI is build around Apple-blah shortcuts.
http://tinyurl.com/2xymvp is a good read on this topic. It's a shame how fragmented this got, as unification at this point is nearly difficult without one side redefining a lot of things and causing a lot of programs to break.
@Tom: Wow man, great link and a very interesting read. Here's a clickable link that goes direct:
How Apple Keyboards Lost a Logo
Thanks Tom!
thanks for the tip! i'm a new mac user and was also lamenting my favorite lost pc key.
I was looking up the file delete key strokes from Finder on the MAC. The key strokes are "command", not sure how to get the command symbol and also what I think is the either a delete or backspace key.
If the key combination they are looking for is delete, that didn't work for me so I assume it's wrong.
I thought perhaps it was a backspace, which I am yet to find.
Would like to easily be able to delete a file with keystrokes.
Suggestions and help are much appreciated!
Thanks... another new MAC user!
subsymi
@subsymi: On a standard Apple keyboard the key to the left of the space bar is the Command key. It is also sometimes referred to as the Apple key and depending on the age of your Mac may be labeled with one or more of the following:
command
⌘
To delete a file in the Finder by using the keyboard first select the file then hold that Command key and hit the "delete" button, which is to the right of the + / = key on standard US keyboards.
I'm not sure if the keys are labeled in the same way or reside in the same position on non-US keyboards.
Thank you, David! I almost regretted converting to Mac when I didn't find the backspace key but your note saved me. Keep posting about other differences between PC and Mac.
Thanks David!
You've saved me much time and heartache.
Exactly what I needed. Thanks!
exactly what I needed
thank you thank you thank you! I'm on week of of my Mac after 20 years of PC use. I love it but missed that key the most!
Thanks so much! I was SOOOO missing that key!
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