-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 (Ted Harding) wrote:
For what it's worth: I have a friend who is assertively proud of his Apple (with some justification ... ). When I was looking at it the other day I indeed wondered where the "#" was on the keyboard, and asked.
He eventually found out how to do it -- after an extensive tour of the internals!
That, for me as a programmer, was the biggest gripe about the Apple keyboard (notwithstanding the swapped " and @ keys) - getting a # was some some insane apple-shift-4 combination. If you spend a lot of time coding (and commenting) languages like Python or Perl, then this is a /real/ usability hassle. In my experience of over 20 years using computers, I have always associated shift-2 with " and the key near return/enter as possessing the @ character. Even my trusty old 1977/78 Commodore PETs (well, CBM actually for the UK market) have the " character in the same position as the 2 would be on a "normal" UK keyboard. I did a fair amount of teaching over in the US, and I ended up taking my own keyboard with me as I would constantly end up typing stuff like 'food = @pasta@;' when using local machines. I feel that the original poster was right: Apple have more-or-less taken a default US keyboard and stuck a £ and Euro sign on it and called it "UK". I too eventually subverted the Mac keyboard with the "hack" internationalisation file so I can use a regular keyboard with it - along with a sensible #, and " as shift-2 :-). Moving constantly from Mac to Linux (on conventional PC hardware) is just too much aggro otherwise. Simon ================================================================== http://nosher.net nosher.net/images/images.rss -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFGd9wy8tdcY+OcZZwRAgBIAJ9nzu2CgBl1NPXKM8oj3P93ECgbOQCg9bfl j+NtX/STgSq24RHR/7d57h8= =UaPG -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----