I just bought a MacBook Pro, and one of my major frustrations is that it’s got all this keyboard bezel space and this cute little keyboard, and yet it is missing a whole host of keys that I “don’t really need”, such as forward delete, page up, page down, home, end, and a trackpad button.

Of course I can do all of those things with key combos, but why should I have to? it wouldn’t have taken much to add another row or column of keys. Hell, I would have even settled for little combination home/page up and end/page down keys in the spaces to the left and right of the up key. And the clicky trackpad is ok, but I can’t rest my thumb on it reliably without triggering multi-touch accidentally from time to time.

I don’t want workaround, I want my buttons back. Apple’s minimalism leads to pretty UI’s and great industrial design, but sometimes it conflicts with actual usability.

For me putting the Forward delete in that position is perfect. The forward delete is on the far left side and the backward delete is on the far right of the same row of the keyboard. It is on a key that I never use anyways allows be to use with just one keystroke. This is software I highly recommend. I love it.

So if you want it, it’s possible. While it maybe more natural to use a backwards delete, there are times when everyone can make use of a forward delete. I just can put that key on the other keys mentioned. I have found, having only a backward delete is something you can get use to. That said, if you do get use to it, using a fn + Delete for a forward delete isn’t so bad. For me, since there was a key I wasn’t using, that is the key I’m mapping to forward delete.

(And why’s the screenshot above stretched vertically?)

Put another way, imagine there was no single Tab key, only a combination of keys. Sure, you could use that combo, but you’d much prefer there to be a single key solution.

*What may be commonly used for me, may not be so for you.

There is an argument that it’s useful to have forward delete in word processors but you can get used to either quite easily. One of my friends who is an author and only ever used macs finds the idea of forward delete weird.

I found as a former Windows user, that it took me about a week to get used to the idea of not having a “forward delete” and then I never thought about it again, (possibly because it never really made any sense that the “forward delete” even exists.)

I much prefer the rationality of *not* having the key and I find that if you are a reasonably good typist you don’t miss it.

finally the last thing windows users complain about has a work-a-round, though, i think i would use the shift+delete for forward delete instead. don’t take my backslash key away!

^_^