A friend of mine used to give computer courses back in the 90s (to people that had never used a computer before).

At one point he said "You need to move the mouse up" and one of the participants actually lifted the mouse physically from the desk - which was perfectly correct for someone not being used to computers.

I always remember this when I think "isn't this obvious?" with regards to usage patterns on computers.

Anecdotally, when I use simple command idioms like ctl-tab to change tabs, alt-tab to change applications, or press alt in an application to bring up the single letter shortcuts for navigating menus my students are blown away.

I have to actively teach them how to use and navigate file folders, how to make an appointment in Outlook, and other fundamental user operations. I don't blame them, I blame the developers primarily of browser based cloud apps and OS's.

Edited to add: this includes using ctl and arrows to move by whole words, etc. fundamental stuff in the apps they would have been using since a young age. Not to mention how to use the fn key to access the other functions of Function keys, and fn-esc to switch the behavior globally on their laptops.

> the fact there are two pointers on the screen -- one for the mouse and one for the keyboard -- if you slide the mouse pointer to a specific point and press a keyboard key, the new key will not appear where the arrow is, it will appear where the text cursor is.

I remember using an (early?) Apollo computer that worked that way... I was warned by the person showing me, and a bit later he accidentally bumped the mouse while I was typing! Letters all over...

I believe this was in the era before X windows took off for unix boxes. I miss SunTools - it was nice and simple.

> if you slide the mouse pointer to a specific point and press a keyboard key, the new key will not appear where the arrow is, it will appear where the text cursor is.

Out of curiosity: were they unfamiliar with the mouse, or were there programs that used a single cursor for both the keyboard and mouse? (I am aware that many text mode programs used a block for both cursors, but haven't seen a program where the two functions were combined.)

Were they the old tabs that looked like tabs, or the newer tabs that look like buttons?

In the obscure ui choices department, I am that weirdo who uses openbsd as a desktop system, At one point not thinking I did ctrl+a in a firefox textentry and much to my surprise it did the right thing and moved the cursor to the beginning of the line.

I had no idea using unix vs windows cursor movement was even an option, because linux never picks the correct method, Still have no clue how it is set(a gtk option? but qt apps are set the same.) But salutes to whatever obsd porter picked it, really made my day.

    gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-key-theme-name 'Emacs'

     ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini
     ~/.config/gtk-4.0/settings.ini


    [Settings]
    gtk-key-theme-name = Emacs

       Oct   Dec   Hex   Char                        Oct   Dec   Hex   Char
       ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
       000   0     00    NUL '\0' (null character)   100   64    40    @
       001   1     01    SOH (start of heading)      101   65    41    A
       002   2     02    STX (start of text)         102   66    42    B
       003   3     03    ETX (end of text)           103   67    43    C
       004   4     04    EOT (end of transmission)   104   68    44    D
       005   5     05    ENQ (enquiry)               105   69    45    E
       006   6     06    ACK (acknowledge)           106   70    46    F
       007   7     07    BEL '\a' (bell)             107   71    47    G
       010   8     08    BS  '\b' (backspace)        110   72    48    H
       011   9     09    HT  '\t' (horizontal tab)   111   73    49    I
       012   10    0A    LF  '\n' (new line)         112   74    4A    J
       013   11    0B    VT  '\v' (vertical tab)     113   75    4B    K
       014   12    0C    FF  '\f' (form feed)        114   76    4C    L
       015   13    0D    CR  '\r' (carriage ret)     115   77    4D    M

I don’t have any resources but this is fascinating to read about, thanks for sharing! So many things we just assume make sense which really don’t.

Their misunderstanding of not being able to hover their cursor over something and interact using the keyboard honestly has me wondering why I thought the real way was intuitive, their logic there makes sense

> have been helping someone who has little experience with Windows or Mac, but used DOS for years ( until pretty recently ) ...

The year is 2026. Who the heck has been using DOS (!?) until "pretty recently"? On what machine?

It took me about 1 month of pain to convert. But now I find cmd far more logical than ctrl. Ctrl asks you to give up a pinky, a home key finger, to execute common chords - far more critical than a thumb, which is already designated for space and chord/modifier keys anyway, on both Windows or Mac. As a result, Windows requires two hands or awkward movement to hit something like ctrl-a, ctrl-z, ctrl-q, etc. The equivalent on Mac can all be one-handed.

Back in the day when I was doing contract work and hopping around a lot, I often had to switch between windows and mac. One of the issues I always ran into was the not necessarily the keys, but where they were positioned.

Doing something basic on a mac like Copying (Ctrl + C) and Pasting (Ctrl + V) had to be done with ⌘ Command. So instead of using my pinky in natural resting by simply shifting my palm down which I was used to. Using the ⌘ Command, I had to use my thumb instead and it was always a weird shift. Having used Windows most of my life, I always had to look down to make sure I was on the right keys on a Mac.

I've tried a few times to go back, but its always been such an unnatural feeling that I just avoid it now like you do.

Same experience for me. I've ended up using Karabiner-Elements. With less than 10 rules (half of which are only for the browser), you can replicate the Windows layout on your Mac, it makes everything much easier.

Hate this. The Apple magic keyboard is my favourite keyboard (least amount of travel/force, for speed and to be easy on my hands/wrists), and I'm paying a yearly license for a software (magic utilities) to remap the keys properly on windows. On a Mac, forget about remapping them, it doesn't work.

I've programmed my work keyboard to swap the places of the left windows key and left ctrl. I'll never go back to pressing ctrl with my little finger instead of my thumb again!

I've even been rebellious enough to swap the left ctrl to a command button.

It's just a matter of practice in the end.

I had the same issue when I first started using a Mac decades ago (coming from being a Linux and Windows user), would get confused with Cmd and default to Ctrl, not understanding how to use diacritics, etc. A few weeks to a couple of months later and it was fine.

Nowadays I very much miss macOS diacritics shortcuts when using Windows, I only have a Windows PC for games with a Swedish/English keyboard but need to write in Portuguese sometimes, I have no idea how to use diacritics on Win11 while my keyboard is set to English, and much prefer the macOS way with Option + [N | E | I | C] (for ˜, ´, ˆ, ç) using any keyboard language, it just works. On Windows I need to change the whole keyboard language to be able to access diacritics easily, no shortcuts such as those.

In a similar boat. I quickly remapped the Mac keyboard to work as close as possible to a Win one, and it helped. But it's a leaky abstraction. And now, as some of the modifier keys are swapped, it's always confusing when I see a shortcut in a menu, never sure what to press. So I'm using fewer shortcuts than on a Win. So, for those who are 100% transitioning to Mac, my suggestion is to bite the bullet and adopt the Mac way. But for those who still live in both worlds (like me), I don't have a good answer, just that it's a constant struggle even after few years.

I have been using Mac since 2018 daily on my day job and I still get confused by the symbols. I wish there was some system option to always display them as words or abbreviations (CMD etc) instead.

But I did get used to the navigation and basic shortcuts after a while. Using the terminal/keyboard/IDE shortcuts (which I can set up myself) for most of the work helps a lot.

Finder is still terrible though.

Been using this layout for the past 12 years:

https://github.com/ivancuric/mac-hr-sane-layout

> If you've ever made the jump from PC to Mac (or vice versa) at work or home

I make this "jump" about 20 times per day. I have iOS, MacOS and 2 windows machines at the moment. Very frequently I will RDP into the windows machines from the MacBook.

> goodbye Outlook-Teams-OneDrive-SharePoint-Excel-Word-PowerPoint-VBA

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/mac/microsoft-...

Maybe it used to be hard to do this and I just got used to it. I have made zero attempts to normalize anything.

Linux for home. Mac for work. At least once a night I try to jump to the address bar in Firefox and accidentally lock the screen instead (win/cmd-L).

The Mac boosters here would be hilariously quaint if it wasn't so frustrating. Docker images that only work on macOS Docker and break on regular Linux. Quips like "Mac is so much more reliable, just use a Mac for Docker!" that I think are genuine opinion rather than a smug joke.

Between this, AI, and all the other brain rot trends, working in tech is so depressing these days.

Painfully? I love the stimulation of my brain to learn something new. It didn’t really hurt.

This is a bit exaggerated... It's not really painful. I worked in a newspaper. The whole designers department moved to PCs when OS10 (a.k.a. OSX) came out. This also coincided with moving from QuarkXPress to InDesign.

Some nice things had been lost, some nice things had been found. Maybe it's also because OSX was also somewhat of a downgrade from OS8/OS9 in terms of user experience. Especially, Finder became a lot worse. So, people didn't feel very motivated to upgrade, and it made the switch easier... But, overall, there was very little struggle, the time we'd spend setting up the newspaper / magazine for print didn't really change.

Well... now, when I think about it, most of us used PCs at home. So, maybe it's not a fair comparison. But, even people who had Macs as their home / personal computers didn't seem to have any issue with the switch.

I think, some people kept the keyboards that came with G3/G4 (the clear heavy plastic ones with black key caps). They could be used with PCs. People didn't keep them to preserve the Mac-style layout (it wouldn't work anyways iirc), they just liked the quality of the physical product and accepted that some keys won't work the same way they did on a Mac.

Even though you could connect Mac mouse to a PC, I don't think anyone used that.

I've kinda got used to Fn-Left and Fn-Right for home and end now. It has taken a very long time though.

  Fn-Left = scroll to top
  Fn-Right = scroll to bottom
  Fn-Up = scroll page up
  Fn-Down = scroll page down

  ⌘-Up = cursor to top
  ⌘-Down = cursor to bottom
  ⌘-Left = cursor to start of line
  ⌘-Right = cursor to end of line

For those ctrl+a and ctrl+e are the way to go.

Dunno. I prefer the mod+arrow keys or terminal shortcuts to 4 new keys

I love that on macOS all in-app shortcuts are consistently Command+Something, like Q for Quit, W to close a window, and Control is usually for system-wide shortcuts, and Shift/Alt/Option is exactly what it says on the tin: modifiers for alternative behavior. You usually won't see Alt/Option on its own for any shortcut..

..while Windows is all over the place. Like why the heck is Alt+F4 used for quitting an app?? What does 4 stand for here? Death in Japanese and Chinese!?

Omarchy does a pretty good job of this. Super+C, Super+V works everywhere, even the terminal in a consistent way. But there are exceptions to super acting like MacOS command, like if you want to select all, then copy you have to do the Ctrl+A, Super+C jujitsu.

The carriage return is moving the typehead to the beginning of the line, not starting a new one.

Line feed is the command that is incrementing to the new line.

Those two commands almost always run together so it quickly became possible to invoke with a single CRLF command (in ancient computer times)

The arrows on newer keyboards are gone. Now it's just text. I wonder if that changes anything because Enter doesn't really sit well with the arrow next to it as entering data need not necessarily cause a carriage return.

I have a delightful image in my mind of you explaining to the kids over breakfast the nuances of enter and return, and how Steven Jobs should burn in hell for confusing generations of Mac users.

> The only keys that exist twice on the keyboard are modifier keys

> The Return or Enter keys do not need to exist twice

I use the doubled enter key much more than i have ever used the secondary modifier keys.

It is very convenient for quickly entering numeric only data with one hand, especially as it is the hand that would naturally use the big enter key.

> The only keys that exist twice on the keyboard are...

I wouldn't take "the standard 104 keyboard layout" as a respectable design.

- If the modifier keys exist twice, then why aren't they placed symmetrically?

- Most users use a mouse with the right hand; yet the numpad is placed on the right side of the keyboard (which means it's even further away). e.g. placing keyboard in front of you in the screen then means the mouse needs to be way off centre.

- That the letters remain asymmetrical shows adherence to tradition/familiarity over improving a good design.

- The spacebar doesn't need to be >6x the size of other keys.

- Caps Lock can be useful but isn't significant enough to be worth putting where it is.

I mean. I can agree with distinguishing "Return" and "Enter". But I wouldn't refer to the typical keyboard layout as if it's a well thought out design.

It hurts both ways. I'm trying to switch to Linux, but the lack of separation between Ctrl-C for Copy and Ctrl-C for break drives me mad. Similarly Ctrl-A for start of line vs Select All, end of line and search pasteboard (there's no search pasteboard!!!)

The NeXT was even better.

The cmd key was a thin key of full width below the space bar. https://deskthority.net/viewtopic.php?t=12260

Although having the Help key where ⌘ is now was not that useful.

I guess your ctrl-C experience depends on which fingers you use to press those buttons? For me it's the other way around. cmd-C feels awkward to press and ctrl-c feels comfortable.

Prefer the positioning of cmd so much I flash all my keyboards firmwares on my windows and Linux machines to have ctrl beside space and super in the far corner.

Genuinely find it better ergonomically because it’s closer to where all the keys it’s pressed with are.

Far corner ctrl makes me use my pinky and splay my hand for it while beside space ctrl feels more natural for a thumb

and then, some of us discovered that we can remap ctrl to be under right thumb or caps

Interesting, that makes no sense to me. I assume you don't touch type.

If you touch type, you hold your 4 fingers on ASDF. If you want to press Ctrl+C, you move your pinky to Ctrl and press C with the index finger or middle finger.

On Macintosh, you have to hold your pinky much too close to the index finger to press Command+C which are very close.

If, instead, you use thumb and index that also puts the thumb in an awkward position because you have to cross the fingers (Command is to the left of C)

What fingers do you use?

That's how it is by default but doesn't approximately everyone, when they first plug a non-Mac external keyboard into their Mac, immediately go to System Settings -> Keyboard -> Modifier keys and switch Command with Option?

Otherwise it would be really confusing when you switch from your external keyboard to the laptop keyboard.

Most newer keyboards I know have a toggle so the CMD and ALT switch in software. I had to switch from Mac to Win and Linux so often that I simply kept my CMD key where Super or Win is located and got used to it. Still sometimes weird when I use an actual Mac keyboard.

Logitech in particular do this. Their keyboards adapt to the OS so the keys are in the right place, not sure if this needs their drivers or not though.

This irks me also, more than I'd normally admit. A couple of solutions I discovered over the years; one is to use `hidutil property --set` from the command line for UserKeymappings to overwrite the non us backslash to the backtick (I can't remember the specific codes for the keys, but you can find them online), however, this was cumbersome when occasionally using an external keyboard (I prefer ISO over ANSI) or if you restart the machine.

Eventually I settled on Karabiner Elements, an app that lets you create a simple modification specifically to target the Mac internal keyboard where you can map `non_us_backslash` (that strange unused key) to `grave_accent_and_tilde` which fixes this.

I do the same. The British PC layout is relatively recent as well, since when I had a Mac in 2013 it didn't exist, and the keyboard layout was the main factor why I ditched it.

Back on Mac now with British PC and it's much less frustrating to use the keyboard. Plenty of other frustrations instead. I'd prefer to be on Linux but the hardware is just too good.

I think of those as emacs keys. Glad they work everywhere, but I suspect that someday they will go away.

Because on mac you use the command key for that not control key.

Looking at old PC keyboards, from IBM Model M to old Gateway 2000 keyboards from the 90's etc, it's looks like it's always been Enter.

But terminals and UNIX machines were more likely to use "Return", e.g. looking at a DEC VT100 or Sun SPARCstation keyboard.

edit: looks like most of the 8-bit machines like Commodore, Atari also used Return. So Enter was mostly an IBM thing.

The original IBM PC keyboard just used an arrow. The keyboard that shipped with the PC AT used Enter, while the enhanced keyboard (Model M) used an arrow for ISO layout keyboards, Enter for ANSI keyboards, and I think some variants for non-PC platforms used Field Exit, which was also used by IBM for many keyboards before the PC. I'm not sure what other vendors may have used, I'm sure there are some return keys out there, and for all I know IBM did ship keyboards with Return instead of Enter.

The word "enter" has now lost all meaning in my brain, but it does look a little weird on my keyboard. Never paid much attention in my 25+ years of computing.

And a weird tangent on deterministic, idempotent elevator buttons [1]:

> I always get a bit nervous when someone tells me that in their country, you can press the elevator button again to unset it.

The way I’ve seen this solved in a lot of countries across SEA is that you unset the elevator button by double-pressing it. It’s not intuitive, and I’ve only discovered it by accident, but it’s deterministic and idempotent: one gesture sets the button, the other unsets it.

[1]: https://unsung.aresluna.org/deterministic-vs-idempotent/

How is Ctrl overloaded in Linux? Other than copy and paste, what do you use it for globally?

I'll take that if you move Fn completely out of they way, preferably far from the lower left corner. As a Windows+Mac user, I map it to <control> because it takes prime real estate and I rarely use it. I hate Fn, to be honest!

ctrl-f4 is used in MDI applications to close one document window of a multi-document application. alt-f4 to close the whole application.

Well, I say "is used", but nothing in Windows is consistent anymore. Especially since web browsers started disrespecting the OS shortcuts. Now it seems like every application follows the web browser UI conventions instead of OS ones.

Off topic but man PowerBook G3s were good looking machines, heat/hinge issues aside.

First key on the right after space bar.

macOS seems to have a “lock direction” for trackpad scrolling on zoomed in windows. Whether you like this or not is in my experience largely a function of how much you do normally do a diagonal scroll. On the one hand it means if you scrolled in to fill a column, you don’t need to be perfectly precise with staying up and down to scroll up and not also scroll the column off to one side. On the other hand if you don’t start with a very explicitly diagonal scroll, it won’t let you scroll diagonally without stopping and starting again.

macOS should in general always extend for the first press, and then move relative to that decision. So if you select some text with the mouse and then shift-left/right it will extend the selection in whichever direction you chose. But after that first extension, you’re now in a “keyboard selection mode” where continuing to move in the first direction will continue to extend, but selecting the opposite direction will shrink the selection. And the up/down keys work the same and relative to the current extension direction (so if you were extending to the right, down will continue extending since going right at the end of the line would move you down, and up will shrink the selection by the same logic. And the reverse for extending to the left)

Mostly this makes sense to me, though it is admittedly annoying when you’ve selected a little too much with the mouse and want to deselect, you need to extend a bit first and then reverse direction.

I swap between Mac and Windows and they both seem to do the same? (Always extending seems like it would be torture.)

Tapping modifiers keys is something you might want to do.

I know many people on smaller keyboards map a single Control tap as ESC.

The only thing special about windows, is that the OS gets to own the Win key completely, which is something not too crazy and I sort of like the idea of ensuring their global shortcuts are always available.

I've been using Macs for close to a decade and I still constantly forget this little fact. I am reading this very comment I am replying to on a Mac and I still had to do a double take to confirm for myself that it's indeed called 'delete'

I geniunely like typing on current Mac keyboards, but regardless: Apple wouldn’t add them to laptops due to space constraints, and on desktop you’ve got plenty of other great options for Mac-compatible keyboards.

Apple's UK layout is annoyingly slightly different from the usual PC one: https://www.thecandidstartup.org/2022/10/07/mac-british-keyb...

Another difference I remembered, this time a Microsoft-only idiocy: core Windows and Microsoft (Office) apps TRANSLATE shortcuts! Ctrl+A (“All”) becomes Ctrl+T (“Tudo”) in Notepad if the computer is in Portuguese. Ctrl+S also stops saving and is replaced by Ctrl+G (“Guardar”).

I can see why Microsoft thought this was a good idea, but the problem is that ONLY Microsoft apps do this, so you have two sets of shortcuts to remember. I don’t know a single person who likes this.

French AZERTY on Windows and on Mac have quite some differences in symbol locations, also drives me crazy when switching to my mechanical keyboard.

In AZERTY, the number row works differently. Unshifted gives symbols and commonly-used accented letters like "é" and "à", hold Shift to get a number.

In Windows keyboard, the unshifted "number 8" key corresponds to a "_" while it's a "!" in Mac. The key below Esc on Windows is literally just the superscript 2 for some reason, on Mac it's "@" unshifted, "#" shifted. We also have a key for "μ" and for "§" in Windows.

On PC the "original" (Windows 3.0 and earlier) shortcuts for cut/copy/paste were Ctrl-Del, Ctrl-Ins, and Shift-Ins respectively. I believe these were inherited from some older IBM user access standards. And for the most part they still work in Windows, especially in command lines.

Ctrl-X/C/V were originally Macintosh (and maybe Xerox before that?) and then were adopted by Windows in the 3.1 era so Word for Windows would match up better with Word for Mac. But PC not having a Command key, and the Windows key not being a thing yet, they were applied to Control instead. Which of course overlapped with the other major use of Ctrl-C as "interrupt" starting back into early UNIX machines (and adopted by DOS) but... being a graphical environment they apparently didn't consider that important at the time.

It is indeed frustrating.

Historically, of course, copy and paste on a Unix machine was a mouse thing and followed X11 conventions. You selected text with the left mouse button — automatically be saved to the primary clipboard just by virtue of being selected, no key press needed — and the middle mouse button pasted it at the location you clicked.

This is somewhat different to having the two part motion/action of select/control-C and click/control-V. It’s boiled down to just select and middle-click. Separately, you can often use shift-Insert to paste the primary buffer.

Caps Lock remapped to control. By using a keyboard where I can remap keys at the firmware level whenever possible, and in the OS when not

Ctrl-C doing different things come from different os/software lineages

> First, it sits near your pinky instead of your thumb

It's not bad if you have a keyboard (e.g. topre) with control in the caps-lock position (or remap it, which I usually do).

And I also agree that the Lisa/Mac-style command-[zxcv] works really well (particularly if you use a mouse with your right hand.)

MacOS has no problem with both control-c (break) and command-c (copy) - why isn't this common in Linux as well (at least for keyboards with a command or windows key, which seems to be many, many keyboards.)

Of (home,end,pgup,pgdown,delete,backspace) the mac has just backspace. And they have just a single control key and such. Clearly the mac keyboard is designed by people that have no idea how to type. There's no "standard windows keyboard" anymore, but even the worst is still worlds better than whatever apple puts out.

You're right, but it's fixable: remap Ctrl and Alt permanently with sharpkeys then do a few rebinding fixes in something lik. Autohotkey. Your main modifier should indeed be a thumbs key just like on a Mac

Ctrl-C dumb double function can also be fixed, use it to copy everywhere universally (use a better terminal with an override) and rebind cancel

> who decided that ctrl-c should be used for both copy and abort???

As usual in most of these cases, there wasn't really a single decision, just some historical artifact no one had the care to think about and fix, so it lingers in defaults

Nope, it is a crying shame the early Linux/Unix desktop environments copied the Windows/IBM CUA shortcuts and now we have to fight every app and every different method there is for setting keyboard shortcuts to fix it. The Ctrl key was already claimed for use in the terminal for signals and line navigation.

Toshy can help but it's still not a perfect fix.

I entirely agree. At $NEWJOB, I had a Linux laptop for a bit while a Mac was on backorder.

Not being able to cut/paste easily because every tool used the Control key for something different, especially in the terminal, was infuriating.

Having the command key handle these kinds of GUI-focused interactions, and Control for most of the terminal-centric and text manipulation (Ctrl-A/E for beginning/end of line, from Emacs) makes the system great to work with.

I didn't mind anything else about my foray into Linux as a desktop OS. If we could get a Linux GUI distro that all it did was match the Mac command key paradigm, I think it would make a lot of people happy.

I use keyboards with two ctrl and two alt keys. Thinkpads and some Dell laptops have them, and of course there are external keyboards with those keys too.

Yeah this drives me crazy too.

As a sibling comment notes, Caps Lock as Control helps a lot but it's still not as nice as Command-based shortcuts, both in hand positioning and in terms of shortcut overlap.

> Am I the only one who finds this astoundingly frustrating?

No, you’re not. That’s why I tend to use the archaic shift-Ins and control-Ins shortcuts for copy and paste on Windows. I feel like a dinosaur every time.

On Linux I just deal with it and curse a lot.

[dead]

Control-c meant cancel for decades before some idiot decided that it ought to mean copy instead.

As for your pinky, just type the chords correctly and you won’t hurt yourself. This means typing the modifier key(s) with the opposite hand instead of the same hand that is typing the letter. So for control-z you are going to type the “z” with your left hand, so use your right hand to type “control”. That’s why the keyboard has every modifier key on both sides.

Indeed. Try telling them that the BBC Micro keyboard had arrow keys that moved a 'copy cursor' about. We should probably never tell them about the ZX Spectrum keyboard. (-:

It is derived from that, exactly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_key

> The ⌘ symbol (the "looped square") was chosen by Susan Kare after Steve Jobs decided that the use of the Apple logo in the menu system (where the keyboard shortcuts are displayed) would be an over-use of the logo. Apple's adaptation of the symbol—encoded in Unicode at U+2318—was derived in part from its use in Nordic countries as an indicator of cultural locations and places of interest.

More here: https://www.core77.com/posts/97914/Debunking-a-Myth-Apples-C...

I immediately swapped the Alt/Cmd when I had to use a Mac...

Regarding Fn even Thinkpad has now changed it so Ctrl is in the corner.

The dead accent key feature is super handy - it means I never have to leave the UK English layout to type in Portuguese. I don't know if that's available because I use the PC variant of the layout, though.