The Blog of Harald

Once upon a time, on Suns (and X-terminals) in a land far, far away, the “Control” key was underneath the Tab key, above the Shift key. Then along came the PC keyboard, which swapped the two. For a while I used to remap my keyboard to put the keys back in the right places, but eventually I had to use too many native Windows machines, so I taught my hands the new Ctrl key location.

Apparently the people that designed Compaq notebook keyboards did so inside of a locked box. Every other laptop I’ve used (Dell, Toshiba, Acer, Sony) has had the usual three or four keys in the bottom left corner of the keyboard: Ctrl, Fn, Alt or Ctrl, Fn, Windows, Alt. Not my Compaq; it has Fn, Ctrl, Windows, Alt!

Who in their right mind does that? They committed two egregious sins: _changing_ a “standard” keyboard layout, and putting a seldom used key (Fn) in the bottom left in place of a commonly used key (Ctrl). I don’t expect most people to know all the emacs Ctrl sequences, but the Ctrl key is used in all sorts of Windows keyboard shortcuts (especially select all, cut, copy, and paste)!!

Even worse, the Fn key cannot be remapped; it is intercepted by the keyboard controller, and used in combination with other keys to generate scancodes for keys that don’t physically exist, like the numeric keypad). _Some_ Compaqs have a BIOS switch to swap the keys; mine doesn’t. So I can’t even swap them back…

For now I’ve found a Windows keyboard remapping utility, “KeyTweak”:http://webpages.charter.net/krumsick/ and I’m using it to change the Caps Lock key to another Ctrl key (thus putting the Ctrl key back where it was a decade ago). I’ve done the same thing on all of my Linux boxes at home. It’s not an optimal solution, because I still have to use other machines with the Ctrl key in the bottom left…

Grrr…

(Everything else about this laptop is spiffy, btw; the keyboard is my only complaint :-)