PC Keyboard: The First Five Years

Re:PC Keyboard: The First Five Years by red_admiral on Wednesday October 30, 2019 @09:44AM (#21397625)

I once worked on a UNIX machine that had F keys at the top, but a separate block on the left with keys for things like cut, copy, paste, save, close etc. I found this incredibly useful and I wish it were still a thing, it saved a lot of time when I was working on documents where I could keep my right hand on the mouse, and use the left one to press these keys with one finger rather than have to "chord" Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V etc.

I realise this is what the F keys were originally meant for, but somehow we never standardised on them in the way that we did for e.g. Ctrl+S = save.

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Re:PC Keyboard: The First Five Years by Snortibartfast on Wednesday October 30, 2019 @11:01AM (#21398474)

That was probably a Sun machine. I used it them at university and liked the copy/paste-keys too.

I had a PC keyboard (Kinesis Freestyle 2) for a while which had this setup with copy/paste as separate keys. Unfortunately for me, these keys were macro keys which sent "CTRL plus the key at position three on line two" etc, and since I use dvorak layout, the C,X and V keys are mapped to Ä,Q and J, which meant "cut" became "quit" (CTRL-Q).

I don't know how Sun handled this, if the edit-keys sent some specific keycode that the program interpreted like "cut" and not just "CTRL-X"?

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