Keyboard

The MacBook keyboard layout is wrong. Control goes in the bottom left corner, but for some reason fn is chilling there. My old ThinkPad also had them in the wrong order. I hate this so, so much, and clearly more people dislike it, as the ThinkPad has an actual dedicated BIOS setting to swap the two. Now the Mac offers the ability to change what the keys do too, at least it seems to. Unfortunately, changing the setting in Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → Modifier Keys does nothing for me. Not a clue if this is a me problem or a macOS one. ...

From day one on the Macbook I looked at how I could make this thing work for me in a way I was accustomed to. I come from Linux, a world of endless possibilities. In the 15+ years I used it as my main system, I got a certain workflow that was my own. People used to joke that I didn’t need to lock my laptop when I was away, as it was unusable to anyone else. I didn’t use a bar. A logged in system would show nothing but the wallpaper. Pressing the super (Windows) key did nothing. Right clicking the desktop did nothing. Sure, a Linux window manager user would press super + enter and they would be greeted by Kitty, my terminal emulator, but no Windows user would press that combination. ...

In many languages there’s a need to add decorations, or glyphs to characters, like for example é or č. These are called diacritics1. These characters don’t exist on a US Standard qwerty keyboard. There is the US International version with dead keys, which allow for crafting these special characters by pressing the desired diacritic key followed by the character to apply it to. So for example pressing ~ followed by n results in an ñ. ...