David Cantrell wrote:
On Fri, Jan 09, 2009 at 04:46:12PM -0800, Michael G Schwern wrote:
Fortunately, OS X comes with the built-in ability to turn Caps Lock into a
modifier key. Unfortunately they felt the need to bury it under a button in
the otherwise empty Keyboard preference.
Unfortunately they also forgot to include any way of remapping the rest
of the keyboard. It would be Really Handy for me to be able to press
Something-o to get the oe ligature, something-a to get the ae ligature,
something-t for thorn, something-d for eth and so on.
The default mapping of alt-[letter] seems to be almost entirely random -
some keys give a greek letter, some a scandiwegian thing, some give
symbols. I'm sure this was useful to someone. Once. Twenty five years
ago. But it should be configurable.
Leaving out a tool to make new keyboard maps I can forgive Apple for. Not
what Joe User really does every day. And their accented character layout,
well, try doing that on Windows and you'll come screaming back to Apple. At
least they mercifully use an additive system (ie. alt-n n to produce ñ, alt-n
o to produce õ, alt-n shift-n for Ñ and so on) so you only have to learn a
handful of special chords (é î ñ ü ò) to cover most of Latin-1. By contrast,
consider the horror of Windows alt key codes. Alt-0233 is é, of course.
Alt-0201 is É and Alt-0252 is obviously ü.
I particularly enjoyed playing online games like WoW from a Mac using
character names like Thüle and be accused of cheating because Windows users
had no idea how to type my name for targeted console commands. You hear that,
all you Europeans? YOU'RE CHEATING AT LIFE!
But I digress.
Burying the ability to switch keyboard layouts in the International preference
with nary a glance at the Keyboard pref pane, that's hateful. Must not be a
lot of dvorak users at Apple.
Even worse is digging out the very useful Character Palette and Keyboard
Viewer applications, for when you want to find out how to type . For some
unfathomable reason they're not really applications. They're not in
/Applications (or the hatefully ambiguous /Applications/Utilities). They
don't get treated by the dock or application switcher like an application.
You can't find it via Spotlight or Quicksliver. They have those annoyingly
tiny window buttons. They're only accessable via, you guessed it, the
International preference. But you can only turn on the ability to open them
in the preference. Then you have to have the International menu turned on
hogging up menu bar space to access them. Further proof that Apple is a front
for UN WORLD DOMINATION!!!
And most hateful of all, both apps are ALWAYS ON TOP!
Nope, they're buried in
/System/Library/Components/KeyboardViewer.component/Contents/SharedSupport/KeyboardViewerServer.app
and
/System/Library/Components/CharacterPalette.component/Contents/SharedSupport/CharPaletteServer.app
Once you've discovered that, at least you can hack up a script so there's
mercifully something in /Applications for you to open.
--
39. Not allowed to ask for the day off due to religious purposes, on the
basis that the world is going to end, more than once.
-- The 213 Things Skippy Is No Longer Allowed To Do In The U.S. Army
http://skippyslist.com/list/
