03.26a The Poor Design of Computer Keyboards; Remapping Keys; Icons versus Language. Once Walter Mossberg wrote a good WSJ column on the poor design of computer keyboards. I forget what he said, but let's think about that theme of computer design.

First, why is there a Caps Lock key? I would much prefer no key at all, since I often hit the Caps Lock key by accident, and it is practically useless. If someone had a weird desire to print everything in capitals, one of the F-keys could be programmed for that.

Second, why is the default setting to have the NumLk on? I can believe there are some people who use the side-numbers as a keypad and don't use the arrow keys, but how many? One percent of users? That is probably an overestimate.

Third, what are Scr Lk, PrtSc, and Break doing? Are these merely vestiges of dinosaur ancestors, like the human appendix?

Fourth, why do computer designers love mysterious icons? The button on this laptop for a wireles connection could be labelled "Wireless". Instead, it has a symbol which I think is supposed to be a radio dish, though it is so stylized that it looks about as much like a radio dish as an "A" looks like cow horns (am I right that that is its ancestry?). My laptop has numerous other tiny pictures that are, if you don't have the manual, similarly mysterious. Is it that engineers, by temperament inclined more to diagrams than to words, hope to use this as the opening wedge to replace human languages? And, by the way, don't pretend that this is a matter of internationalization. This is an Anglo-American, English language keyboard. And to a Kurd, English words are no less mysterious than a picture of two squares separated by a bar. (That's the key for "external monitor").

Of course, some of this has an obvious software fix. A feature Windows should have had long ago is a keyboard remapper. Then I could just set Cap Locks to have no effect, and remap Prt Sc to do something useful, like put highlighted text in quotes. I could even freeze the Ins key so if I hit it by accident, I wouldn't start wrecking my text. But Windows doesn't seem to do that. There must be a freeware program somewhere, and at some point I'll find it.

[in full at 04.03.26a.htm ]

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