> I've been a software engineer for quite a number of years now. ... I bought a mac and iphone a few months back ... and there was a lot of cursing involved.
I'm not sure what's worse: the inane keyboard compared to Linux or the ridiculously dumbed-down featureset that makes it effectively impossible for a power user to even try to transition into macOS.
When I see someone calling the keyboard things like 'inane' I read 'not what I'm used to'.
Personally I found the keyboard a breath of fresh air when I switched from Windows/Linux. The whole text editing experience is gloriously consistent and logical, though marred by a growing number of cross-platform apps that don't behave correctly.
What I think of as inane is Linux's having a slightly different key combo for copy depending on what context you're in. Or all the mad extended keyboard keys I used to use that were in a different place on every laptop.
[the keyboard experience is much less well thought out on non-English keyboards though, as another comment points out, come on Apple sort it out]
That's a fair argument to be made. But in my case, I grew up on Mac OS 9 which had mostly the same key sequences. I transitioned to Windows, and that was definitely "not what I'm used to". But then moving into Linux, almost everything can be configured and the user experience across apps is consistent. Except for the terminal that needs control-shift-c instead of control-c, but that's because terminals inherit control-c for tty control.
On macOS/X? Nope, I've made up my mind: macOS has inane keyboard layouts, reduced key availability, and many things can't be reached at all by just by tabbing around a few times.
I wish it was slightly easier to type a #. But OTOH it's /way/ easier to type accented characters (in either the fast way for regular use or the slow way that's much more discoverable) or different types of punctuation. Without memorising numerical codes, which is what I remember from Windows.
I certainly don't miss all the extra navigation keys, when I have the meta-keys and cursors right under my fingers, exactly the same on any Mac I use.
I'm struggling to remember more than minor differences from a PC keyboard. N.B. I'm in the UK so that might make a difference.
> No keypad, no pageup/pagedown/home/end/delete (I use all of them very frequently), arrow keys are misplaced and tiny (also use them a lot), no F1-F12 keys, no screenshot button, funky command key instead of using control key like any sane OS, and the command key is where the option key belongs, blah blah.
I had all of those keys when I was using Mac OS 9, 25 years ago.
Well, I won't cover all the same things the replies do there!
I can empathise, as I always used a full size keyboard on Windows/Linux, and I chose Thinkpads and decent Dells where the extended key layout wasn't completely bastardised.
I insisted on a full size Mac keyboard for nearly a decade afterwards. Then I realised that, barring the niceness of full height cursor keys, it was a useless appendix that meant I had to move my hand ~8 inches more every single time I needed the mouse/trackpad.
And they have F1-12, though you need Fn to use them unless you invert their function in settings. And they have a numerical keypad, as well as pageup/pagedown/home/end/delete - on a full size keyboard. And you can type all those things easily using the meta keys and cursors on the bottom row anyway. And why would screenshot need its own meta key in 2025, with so many ways to screenshot or record. But I digress.
What drive me crazy when using Windows for work is the abysmal copy/paste support.
Just 2 minutes ago I started an email, was composing a numbered list of steps, saw that a co-worker sent another email to the same thread, so I copied the text I was working on and replied to the latest mail.
The numbered list of steps was no longer a numbered list that I could continue auto-incrementing, but just plain text.
And that's just from one Microsoft program to itself. Copying text between two different Microsoft apps rarely preserves the formatting I want. Copying text between Microsoft and a 3rd party application is guaranteed to be an exercise in frustration.
On the other hand I cannot stand it when copy/paste preserves formatting. The last thing I want when I paste some text somewhere else is fonts, colors, hyperlinks, and numbered lists coming along with it. 90% (or more) of the time I just want the plain text.
Same. But there are a few rare instances I do want formatting preserved.
I've resorted to using PowerToys on Windows for this, it has a little utility called Advanced Paste. Win+Shift+V brings up a little modal and you can choose to paste as plain text, markdown, json, and a bunch of other functions, or you can give it your OpenAI API key and have ChatGPT format clipboard contents for you.
The keyboard issue when switching from Windows/Linux to Mac is understated. It's a pain and I think it's worse for non-english keyboards/characters. You have to use plugins/3rd party software and relearn new keys.
No keypad, no pageup/pagedown/home/end/delete (I use all of them very frequently), arrow keys are misplaced and tiny (also use them a lot), no F1-F12 keys, no screenshot button, funky command key instead of using control key like any sane OS, and the command key is where the option key belongs, blah blah.
>funky command key instead of using control key like any sane OS
That "funky" command key makes it so you can copy paste into/out of a terminal with the same keyboard combo you use everywhere else. Ctrl being used to send signals to the terminal and also all over the place for different thingsin the GUI stinks.
Home and End are mapped to C-a and C-e literally everywhere in Cocoa. Same as in the terminal.
Methinks you're just annoyed because it's different than what you're used to. There's nothing wrong with that, but arguing about subjective preferences as if they are objective facts is silly. There's nothing wrong with the Mac's keyboard shortcuts out of the box, and they can all be customized with a NeXTSTEP style plist placed at ~/Library/Keybindings/DefaultKeybindings.dict (There's a default set inside of the AppKit framework bundle's Resources folder, or grab a commented copy here https://github.com/ttscoff/KeyBindings/blob/master/DefaultKe...).
Like, I'm annoyed X and thus all of desktop Linux just copied Windows' dumb keyboard combos that put everything on Ctrl, but that's hardly a reason for me to slag off the entire platform, because its minor, and I can just change them if I really wanted to.
> Home and End are mapped to C-a and C-e literally everywhere in Cocoa.
Even in iOS, if you have a hardware keyboard attached! But Ctrl-a/e have come in with BSD, the more common Mac shortcuts are Cmd-left/right, which go to the beginning/end of the current line, whereas Ctrl-a/e follow wrapped text.
The OS supports all of those keys still. Yeah you don't get them on a laptop keyboard but I rarely use the laptop keyboard as is, it's docked 80+% of the time for me at my desk so I have a nice full size keyboard I use.
Never missed a dedicated screenshot button though, I always just Cmd+Shift+4
Control key is easy to reach for me when it's placed in the bottom left corner instead of where it doesn't belong, beside a worse-then-useless Fn key, which is in the control key's place in the bottom left corner, which decides to make random (undocumented, even) functions of so many of the normal keys, and those normal keys don't even have labels for what the Fn key does in that combination like other keys with eg sound, brightness, etc controls.
Fn + A, for example. What the hell is that doing? It opens a fucking emoji window. Do you know how many times I've accidentally control-A to select all and then... oops no more keyboard input unless I press escape, and by the time I realize the mistake, I've already typed a bunch of other things and even more unwanted things happen.
And the control key is where the power key belongs, the command key is where the alt key belongs.
On linux I can type 120+ words/actions per minute on a bad day, around 160 on a good day. On a macbook air? I'm lucky to do an even dozen per minute because I have to slow the fuck down and soooooo many features are missing that I have to actually move a hand to the mouse to figure out a workaround.
Oh speaking of mouse, I literally detest touchpads. Apple's touchpad is not really much better despite the hype. Nothing like trying to position your cursor somewhere then try to click on something but moved the cursor off of it instead. Rinse and repeat until you finally press the touchpad in just the way it likes to activate a button click without also moving the cursor off of the object I wanted to press.
I'm only just now using a Mac again after not using them since elementary school. Tucking my thumbs under the rest of my hand to press the command key is a motion I'm really not used to, while as before I was really used to using my pinky to press/hold the control key often.
I do have to say though, its nice not having to worry about situations where I need to remember some odd shortcut for something that actually supports control characters like text consoles. I never need to worry about "does ctrl+c actually copy here, or does it kill things?" They're just different button presses. I get the logic these days of having those things be different keypresses than control key logic.
A lot of keyboard shortcuts I use daily now feel quite alien because of tucking my thumb under to reach the command key. And boy is it sometimes annoying having so many shortcuts using number keys in them. And the common jump between words or jump to the end or start of a line seem to be backwards in my mind (command+arrow versus option+arrow), I tend to get mixed up on those a bit right now.
The weird thing about "tucking your thumbs" is that you get used to that after a while if you mostly use Apple keyboards, and then you end up trying to do Cmd+C in Windows or Linux.
This is one case where I feel that Apple's take is genuinely more useful for largely historical reasons related to terminals, but at the same time Windows also can't change for legacy reasons of its own, and Apple ends up being this special flower that doesn't work "like most everything else" (i.e. most desktops around - which aren't majority macOS even in countries where it has strong penetration). Basically as soon as you introduce it into the equation, constantly switching back and forth becomes painful.
Its definitely already happening. I almost have to think about hitting Ctrl+C these days when I'm wanting to send a sigint as I'm hitting Ctrl much less than before.
> I never need to worry about "does ctrl+c actually copy here, or does it kill things?"
I've never had that trouble. Terminals are the only place where it's something different, for historical reasons. Copying/pasting in well-designed terminals is shift-control-click, which is easily pressed when the control key is where it belongs. Pinky on control, ring finger on shift, index finger on C.
Terminals are the most common place, I agree. I spend a lot of time in terminals, definitely more than an average user.
> Copying/pasting in well-designed terminals
This implies there are less well designed terminals.that do it otherwise, which is kind of my point. I don't think I've ever done the shortcut you mentioned. Some would copy on select, some on a click on the marked area, some other ways as well. Pasting has been a click, or shift+insert, or Ctrl+shift+v, or a few others.
On a Mac, it's command+c/command+v, everywhere. It's a shortcut that doesn't change.
I'm far from a Mac fanboy but that's a nice little thing.
So the biggest thing is the laptop keyboard layout isn't great, and not every input field is tabbable? And that prevents powers users from even trying to migrate?
> that prevents powers users from even trying to migrate?
Prevents? No. Hinders? Absolutely.
I only have a mac because it was issued by work as a loaner while they set up my new Linux laptop. I wouldn't want to use it as a daily driver at all because I still exclusively use Linux at home, and likely would never get over the keyboard differences.
I'm not sure what's worse: the inane keyboard compared to Linux or the ridiculously dumbed-down featureset that makes it effectively impossible for a power user to even try to transition into macOS.