[ALUG] The thick plottens...

[Ruth Bygrave]

I think I've got it now. In fact, everybody was right.

1) Typewriters didn't standardise on the punct/shifted keys  
consistently.
2) Adrian and I were right that Apple showed arrogance in ignoring  
the de facto localisation standard provided by overwhelming MS market  
dominance over the last 20 years.
3) The Mac user group may well be right that when Apple decided to  
face it out anyway, they had a look at the issue and decided that  
there wasn't enough reason to break the UI guidelines by having a  
poor 'reach' on something everybody used very frequently (double- 
quote) vs something that was effectively only used for e-mail  
addresses -- so it's used frequently-ish, but once you've got your  
machine properly set up with your address-book, you clip in e- 
addresses or start typing the shortcut name, and don't type the @  
itself by hand much at all. Also, now I think about it, the 'double- 
quote is shifted single-quote' is intuitively obvious. After all,  
once I got used to not hitting my head against a brick wall by using  
Alt-F4 to close a running app, Cmd-Q made perfect sense and didn't  
take long to retrain my fingers at all.

Well, I'm glad that's sorted out! I'll give it a go seeing if I can  
retrain my fingers to the Mac British layout instead of hacking the  
keyboard to the MS UK layout -- but maybe 20 years of brainwashing by  
MS will prove too strong. Dammit.

How's Linux for UI and consistent keybindings? You realise this will  
have a big influence on whether I feel 'at home' in it, even  
practising with a LiveCD.

Regards, (...fights the urge to say 'Or do you all live inside emacs  
and have four hands apiece?' <gd&r>...) Ruth