I was recently looking at another site linked from HN which had dozens of split keyboard designs. One of the ones that I really liked was the Matias Ergopro, which has dedicated Cut/copy/paste/undo keys. That seems really convenient, made me wonder why more keyboards don't do this. Maybe it is a slippery slope, but those four shortcuts are so ubiquitous across so many pieces of software that I think it makes sense to have dedicated keys for them. As a Dvorak keyboard typist, the standard shortcuts become pretty annoying (no longer doable with one hand) so the thought of having a single key for those operations really appeals to me. But I would think it would also be something that would have caught on amongst the masses as well. I wonder, what percentage of computer users know the shortcuts for those operations, versus use menus or icons to perform copy and paste

Funny to hear this, because I have that Matias keyboard and never ever use those dedicated undo/cut/copy/paste keys, because I feel there's no point retraining myself to get used to their placement (in a column on the far left of the board) when they're never going to be on my laptop keyboards too.

AFAIK those keys send the equivalent of the literal key chord (e.g. Cmd-Z) to the computer. I wish I could flip a switch and have them be considered keys in their own right, maybe F13-F16.

True.. at this point I have figured out how to remap the qwerty ctrl-c ctrl-v etc to work as cut paste under Dvorak so having dedicated keys might just involve too much retraining, so maybe it would not be worthwhile

Interesting point, I never think of the Dvorak people like yourself and I apologize for that :p Never really thought about how all the keyboard shortcuts the world accepted make zero sense outside of QWERTY

Honestly, copy/cut/paste in today’s world warrants physical keys far more than insert/print screen/etc. Maybe someone will decide to challenge that one day, but I’m sure people will have a million reasons why it can’t happen.

Everything is suboptimal for everyone and life goes on I guess lol

The pioneer was the keyboard for the Xerox Star in 1981 and it had the keys you want:

https://www.digibarn.com/friends/curbow/star/keyboard/index....

Back in those days, it was ordinary for application software to ship with cardboard over-the-keyboard templates showing the commands associated with key combinations. The user could swap them out between different applications.

Using key combinations for the operating system would have encroached on “application space.” Even today the standard keyboard has dedicated home, page down, delete, keys (etc.).

The cardboard overlay became less viable as bespoke keyboards were replaced by commodity designs with arbitrary key layouts and spacings.

The overlays generally encompassed only the top row of the keyboard (which is an island) right? So they indexed the top row and the row immediately below. At least those are the kind I remember and are easy to find on Google images. Or were there also larger/full keyboard overlays that made use of the other gutters between islands of keys?

Also, I remember these for the Model M keyboard layout. What other standard keyboard layouts were popular for the cardboard guides?

Since everyone followed the IBM keyboard layout, the templates fitted virtually every keyboard. Right now I'm typing on an Apple Extended keyboard from about 1987 and it has little pegs at top right and top left corners of the casing for the keyboard templates to hang on.

Before the Extended layout, the F-keys were in a vertical double row to the left of the QWERTY block, as shown here: https://deskthority.net/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer_keyboard

There were some F-key cardboard templates to fit over those keys, but they were less common -- partly because the original PC was so limited, maxing out at 640 kB of RAM and a 4.77MHz CPU, and not coming with a hard disk as standard, just 360 kB floppy drives, so that apps tended to be small and simple and not have very rich functionality to learn and remember.

But 3rd parties made ones you could stick on, e.g. https://imgur.com/gallery/pwNQZ9S

By 1980, we had been through almost two decades of keyboard input - 10 years of the screen and keyboard. Using shortcuts was common, and without a mouse, required. Most "professional" keyboards came with some combination of ctrl, alt, meta, and option keys. The Cat came out at an interesting time. There was a ton of experimentation in the market - most people did not own a computer or know how to use them. The Cat is a very interesting take on easy to use and if you are into UX, reading through the built in help on the Cat is really interesting. http://www.canoncat.org/canoncat/onlinehelp.html

> wonder why they couldn’t have been replaced with keyboard shortcuts

I'm not sure I understand; I'd guess they were used often enough to justify a separate key. E.g. some TV remotes still have a "Netflix" button.

To be clear, the Netflix button is paid for by Netflix: https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2020/4/24/21232655/n...

Thanks, I didn't know that. One more reason for application specific keys, I guess.

Product placement and UX improvements could coexist too; sometimes literally, e.g. this keyboard has a MS office button and an emoji button: https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/11/20909475/microsoft-offic... .

This is true.

I was doing PC tech support in 1988-1992 -- the era when the PC world went from MS-DOS to Windows 3.0 to Windows 3.1. (And a few weirdos, like me, ran OS/2 2, because Linux wasn't ready yet.)

I used to support, for instance...

• WordStar (3/4, Express and 2000)

• WordPerfect

• Ashton-Tate MultiMate

• IBM DisplayWrite

• MS Word for DOS

... on almost a daily basis, plus lots more occasionally: LocoScript, VolksWriter, PC Write, Samna Executive, and more.

Every one had a totally different user interface. Every keystroke, every menu -- if it had menus; lots didn't -- every status bar, with no similarities.

There was one key -- one -- that almost everyone respected: F1 for Help. Except WordPerfect, where it was F3.

Then IBM introduced a standard called Common User Access, soon after the Mac started kicking IBM's backside in user-friendliness.

CUA mandated that all apps should have a menu bar, at the top of the screen. (Lotus 1-2-3 and MS apps put it at the bottom, before.) It should have options called:

File -- for loading and saving. (Previously, MS called this "Transfer". Lotus called it "Workspace". WordPerfect didn't call it anything but it was on F7, or Shift-F7, or Ctrl-F7, or Alt-F7, or Shift-Ctrl-F7 (etc) depending on what you wanted to do.

Edit -- for editing: cut, copy, paste, search, replace, etc.. (Mostly not even a menu before, just hotkeys.)

View -- for controlling viewing options: text mode, graphics mode, colour, show formatting codes, whatever.

And a bunch of others, but all had to be 1 word only, with a unique letter to open the menu with the Alt key.

The last had to be Help.

And so on. It mandated a standard, borrowing heavily from the Mac HCI guide to do it. And amazingly, it mostly caught on. MS followed it for Windows, mostly, and after Windows 3.0 DOS app vendors found it beneficial to make their clunky old DOS apps at least look and work vaguely like their Windows apps.

Ironically, MS itself had to change more than most. MS Word 3, 4 and 5 were nothing even vaguely like CUA. To load a file in them, you pressed Esc to open the menu (2 lines at the bottom of the screen), T for Transfer then L for Load.

After CUA, in Word 5.5 (a free download now, if you want to try it out -- works well under DOSemu in Linux), this was replaced by Alt-F for File, then O for Open.

Old DOS Word users had a lot of relearning to do.

Long ago, I expanded this from a stub into an article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access