Send complaints to the MIT AI Lab (CSAIL), where many of those who built those early keyboards, and founded companies with magical names like SYMBOLICS and THINKING MACHINES, are stildl there, including legends Prof. 40 years later, does that make sense? Zero sense. Sometimes, they reflect extremely idiostyncratic but clever insights, like left-bit-shit a particular group of four keys and you happen tro get some desireable biti patttern for “free” – so yep they would exploit that. ![]() Go back to the th ose keyboards and the oft-used combos, and they make great sense. Are yuou sure they are the same thing everywhere and derive from the legacy? The point above about how the rpesent keyboard is not so great for a particular terminal cuts tot he chase – among many reasons some symbols or use of choice locations (eg the modifier-letter combos in the lower leftr of the mac keyboard) seem odd is because they were at one time closer to optimal for the terminals/hot key convntions/legacy demands of the past. What terms do they use for that symbol? ControlL? Not meta or the few otehrs that used to be invogue, particuarlyu for MIT LISP Scheme machines. FOr example, ISO adopts Unicode wholesale. To save countless time, any further useful context. I’m used to the symbols and I like them, but I understand the problems tyros face. I guess the original idea was that pictographs were easier to recognize at a glance, but as people switched to the Mac, it was easier just to spell out the words. It’s used on road maps in Scandinavia to indicate camp sites, and it was easily adapted to “command.” Options, if you will.Īpple needed a symbol for Command, so a woman at Apple came up with the “cloverleaf” symbol. Imagine a teensy train coming from the left it has two possible ways to go. The option symbol, as someone noted, looks like a railroad switch. It goes all the way back to the days when Alan Turing said, “Let there be computers.” And there were. The light, caret-like symbol is perfect for Control. ![]() Run the terminal and type “nano” to see this convention in action. In days of yore, when dinosaurs weren’t just in zoos and computers only had text-based applications, and screen space was at a premium, the caret was used to indicate control: ^C was control C for example. Thanks to Lri for posting these secondary symbols in the comments. The above list is the standard keyboard symbols for most keyboard shortcuts, below is a more complete list of some of the symbols that appear elsewhere in menus and the keys they map to. The standard keyboard symbols you’ll encounter on most Mac and Apple keyboards are as follows, but we have a complete list below as well: I’ve been using Macs since I was a little kid and the Option and Control key symbols have always perplexed me to the point where I’ll forget which each is, and that is precisely why Apple is gradually moving to the labeled keys rather than symbol keys. Now you know, but if the symbols confuse you, don’t feel too bad about it.
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