A shout-out

By | May 4, 2010

Just wanted to give a quick shout-out to Mike Wille, for saving me a ton of frustration.  Thanks man, I owe you one sanity (TM).

2 thoughts on “A shout-out

  1. Janssen

    First of all, who are you and what have you done with Dan? I’m pretty sure you would never willingly use a Mac, so what are you using a Mac for? Are you starting iPad/iPhone development?

    Secondly, more of a response to Mike Wille’s rant, but it’s almost three years old: this difference in functionality is likely for historical reasons as well as a hardware design decision. My reasoning is mostly conjecture, but I think it is accurate. The Apple standard keyboard didn’t (and still doesn’t) have Home/End/PageUp/PageDown keys. You need to have the Apple extended keyboard to get those, although now some standard keyboards include those keys using the Fn + arrow keys.

    So to fill this functionality gap on standard keyboards, they made command + left/right arrow keys have Home/End function you want. I’m unaware of a replacement for the PageUp/PageDown function you want, but command + up/down arrows puts the cursor at the beginning and end of a file. Having grown up using Apple machines, I see those four keys as substitutes the scroll bar instead of moving the cursor.

    It really comes down to what you’re used to. I’m glad you found a simple way to change the keybindings to what you want.

    Reply
  2. Dan

    The default keyboard not having those keys is no reason to make those keys behave differently if they happen to be present 😉

    As for why I got a Mac, yes, it’s for iPhone development. I’m interested in mobile development, so I may as well develop for the mobile I own, and that’s an iPhone, so that means I need a Mac.

    An addendum to my post – the built-in Terminal app ignores the global Home/End key settings that Mike Wille’s post fixes; to fix that you need to do this:

    – Open Terminal preferences.
    – Click the “settings” tab at the top.
    – Make sure you have the active terminal theme selected on the left.
    – Click the “Keyboard” tab on the right.
    – Find “home” and “end” in the key list.
    – Select the key in the list, then click the “Edit” button below the list.
    – In the popup, change Action to “send string to shell:”
    – Enter the appropriate keycode:
    — For “home”, enter \033OH
    — For “end”, enter \033OF
    (That’s backslash-zero-three-three-O-H, or O-F.)

    … You know, if anyone needs it.

    Reply

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