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THANK YOU !

This annoys me every time as well. Even after 4 years of using a Mac I have to IM a friend of mine every so often so he can remind me what those damned symbols mean.

Well said – fix that keyboard apple!

If you have a Mac a few years old you would see that the Option key has this symbol. And all previous Mac before had this symbol. Just recent machines are showing “option”

Agreed.

The one thing I hate about macs – shortcuts that require more than the option key.

Is it control, option, alt , shift? WTF .

Apple’s been really inconsistent with actually painting these symbols on the keyboard over the years. They’ve been on international keyboards from time to time, but I don’t think I’ve ever had an Apple US keyboard with them.

I’ve long since memorized the symbols, but it still bugs me too.

This is one area where Apple’s credibility as usability gods falls over completely.

The option icon is intended to look like a code branch. Or, if you prefer, a highway exit. Picture yourself traveling along the line from left to right, you see that it looks like you took the alternate route.

Amen. I couldn’t agree more. I have an old textmate cheat sheet posted on my office wall, not because of the textmate hints, but because it defines what those symbols are.

I own a black macbook and an aluminum wired keyboard, both with Portuguese layout, and except for ctrl (^), the keys are properly labeled with the abreviation and the icon.

But then again we, foreigners, pay more than you do for the same devices.

Apple still has the symbol for option printed on keyboards with norwegian layout (together with ‘alt’).

I think the option key kind of looks like a fork in a road. You can see it more clearly in this photo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Option-key.jpg

That’s the mnemonic I use

A lot of the keyboard shortcut symbols are historically-based. The option key, as kTag mentioned, used to have the symbol on it. Here are my useful mnemonics for decoding keyboard shortcuts:

The option key is also the “alt” key, which is what the symbol depicts: an “alternate” path. It could also indicate a line picking a particular option.

The shift key is a hollow vertical arrow, which mimics what you see when you capslock in an OS password field.

The control key uses a carat because that’s what UNIX uses.

Escape (one of the rarest keys used in a shortcut) is a circle with an arrow “escaping” from it. While it might be rare, it’s one of the keys used for the all-important Force Quit dialog: Command + Option + ESC (⌘⌥⎋)

Same with Twitterific for iPhone – after 6 months of daily use, I still can’t remember what the icons do.

Funny. I have latest macbook pro and all the keys are as they should be (with symbols), but I live in Poland and bought it here.

Thank you! Glad to know I’m not the only one who has to look it up everytime.

I think Apple’s fix for this is called Multi-touch.

Is this a problem with just US Macs?

I’m in the UK, my three year old MBP and my external keyboard both have all these printed on the keys.

Am I missing something?

To me, the option key clearly represents a diversion from a normal path. I don’t know of any better way to represent “option.”

In general, I like the option key. For example, “Hide” becomes “Hide Others” when you hold option. “Quit” becomes “Force Quit.” It seems most shortcuts that use option are slightly different than an existing shortcut that does not use option.

I agree that they should put the symbols on the keys. Having learned the symbols years ago, I haven’t been annoyed by this. That might be why Apple thought symbols didn’t need to be printed on the keys. Everyone at Apple knows them already.

Death by a thousand paper-cuts applies to ALL UIs in my opinion, not just Windows or Linux, but Apples too. They’re just different paper-cuts.

I tend to switch my main OS wholesale every 5 – 7 years just because I get tired of the same old paper cuts every day.

aggravating this, i have found that long time mac users have a habit of referring to the command key as control, though this behavior seems to have waned in the last few years.

THANK YOU ! I rarely go out of my way to lean keyboard shortcuts because I can never remember what the symbols mean. Say what you want about Windows, at least I know which the Ctl, Alt, and Shift keys are.

I resented those symbols for the longest time. It took a concerted effort to memorize them, and I know manage to read them without pause. But, I still remember my frustration with the assumption that these were somehow universal.

Agreed… absolutely hate the mystical runes they use for the commands. I keep this page bookmarked when decryption is needed: http://www.tipstrs.com/tip/1123/Decrypting-Apple-keyboard-command-symbols

Agree, I would use more shortcuts if I could quickly understand what the key commands were to make it happen.

According to Wikipedia, “[The option] symbol, originating on the Apple Lisa, represented the pull-out plastic card situated under the Lisa keyboard.”

amen

Also thank you!

I have this problem all the f-ing time!

This bothers me quite regularly. Apple makes the OS, Apple makes the hardware, surely they could get the symbols on the screen to be on the keys they correspond to.

The problem is that there are four special mod key: fn, ctrl, option and cmd. Do we really need all of them?

I would really appreciate if Apple get rid of one of them.

This is a large difference between US and non-US keyboards. Many of the keys don’t have words on but the symbols instead: http://lowendmac.com/mail/mb07/art/macbook_keyboard.jpg

I couldn’t agree more. This is one area of usability I’d think would be fairly easy to improve – print the symbols on the keyboard.

I also agree with John K. – how many of these “function” keys do we really need? But if you get rid of any of them you immediately have backwards compatibility issues with apps that have started using them (including the OS itself). Perfect example why not introducing something that adds complexity is the way to go if you can get by with it (isn’t that one of the “rules” of Getting Real?).

Ah, keyboard shortcuts on the Mac.

I’m a software developer who makes his living on Windows machines. I have a friend who went on a long vacation and took only his iPhone with him. Believing he might save me from my ignorance, he let me borrow his Macbook Pro for the entire time he was gone.

I used the Mac for everything I did at home. Browsing the web, preparing documents, everything. My impression overall was very “meh.” It was fine, but not a great deal better (or worse) than Win 7.

But the one thing that drove me nuts were the shortcut keys. I never did figure out what the “option” symbol was until I googled it. Maybe it’s obvious to a Mac geek, but to this Windows geek, not so much.

I thought it very strange that a company so widely known for having a well-designed UI would overlook something so fundamental. But maybe I shouldn’t be suprised. We all know Apple’s attention isn’t really on Max OS X anymore. iOS is where the fun stuff is happening.

I agree that it makes no sense at all until you learn it, but… once you know what they mean, how could it be a big problem? It’s no more complicated than learning the key commands themselves.

+1

It would be nice if apple printed the shortcut symbols on all keys such as shift, control, etc.

You guys are a bunch of sissies!

Well, that’s why mattias tactile keyboards have those symbols on them ;)

Jamis,

And I thought I was mentally crippled or something. Thanks for reaffirming this. No matter how many times I look at these symbols, I stumble. The Option and Ctrl symbols always stop me dead in my tracks. Throw a combo of the two at me and it’s like Hiro Nakamura just blinked! Could it have something to do with being a Windows user in a past life?

I think I’m gonna take a fine Sharpie and draw them on my keyboard.

The option key looks like a switch to me (electronics, railroads, something…), and you have the “option” of setting it one way or the other. Cmd really doesn’t make sense (as I recall they borrowed the symbol from Swedish “point of interest” highway signs), but at least it’s printed on the key. However, Option has historically been printed on the keyboard occasionally.

I find ”^” for Ctrl surprisingly nerdy for Apple, but it’s not used very often. In fact, your screenshot is filled with keys that aren’t used very often, so it’s somewhat misleading in terms of how difficult it really is to figure out ordinary keyboard shortcuts, but I do agree: sometimes they make me think. (I can’t tell you the difference between Home/End and Page Up/Dn off the top of my head right now … and anything involving arrows looks really similar until I study the icon for a bit.)

That is exactly what I was thinking myself.!

thers (⌥) icon on alt keys on macbook pro’s ;) tho shortcuts are weird – time for fix …

Amen! This has annoyed me for years.

The English Apple keyboard uses symbols instead of words ;)

my mac (german) shows the symbols, all of them.

As a windows developer on a large game team (30+ engineers).... I’m one of the few on the team that has to use a mac for our ports.

Besides not recognizing the symbols (admittedly from being a mac newbie), what’s worse for me is that what is normally Ctrl-c/v on windows to copy/paste is now Apple-c/v on a mac. Even more painful: we don’t have mac keyboards, we use windows USB keyboards where the Apple key maps to the Windows key. Yes, I suppose that makes sense, but the physical location is different.

So now we have this problem when trying to do simple things like pasting: Windows users hit Ctrl-v, Mac users hit Alt-v, but the computer expects Windows-v

Windows vs Mac is quite polarizing sometimes…. Nobody wins .

I thought I was stupid! I’m so glad that I’m not alone. My name is Evan, and I struggle with Apple’s keyboard modifier key notation.

well imagine working on a hackintosh…

Yep it’s a little weird. I’ve met people who call the command key the Apple key because it had both the apple icon and the command icon, but the apple is much more iconic. It wasn’t until a couple of years ago that macs came with the word “command” and the command symbol and no apple icon to clarify the whole thing.

Or – why don’t the icons within the menus just change color (slightly) as you fumble for the right key combination? I don’t necessarily think that the solution is to label the keyboard keys, but for the software to do a better job reinforcing our short term memory.

Your post strikes a big nerve. We helped to build a ‘hints’ panel into Illustrator CS3 (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/knowhow/) that was designed to simplify issues like this, it worked really well.

@Martin Pilkington: Thank you, I was just about to suggest to look at your keyboard to find the symbols. I didn’t realize that’s because I have a non-US layout.

what strikes me as most odd, is the difference between the European and the American keyboards. WHY ? I, like the other Europeans here, never seen the problem.

The only thing I’ve found problematic is the difference between Mac and Windows as the ctrl key, which is used as the main “option” key on windows, is in a different position from the option key on the mac. And don’t even start on talking about the “windows” key you always accidentally hit…

Scandinavian keyboards (peripherals and laptops) have symbols and texts on all keys but the ctrl (it only has the text).

I know why this is the way it is.

There is a standoff between the lead of the team that designs the keyboards and the team that designs the menus, and neither is willing to give in and change their design to make the others’ product more usable.

Steve won’t step in because he has bigger fish to fry.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Option_key :

“Apple commonly uses the symbol ⌥ (U+2325, 8997 in decimal) to represent the option key. This symbol, originating on the Apple Lisa, represented the pull-out plastic card situated under the Lisa keyboard.”

It seems that this is only affects the US, finally something that favours European people :D

alt to me looks like something taking an alternate route, kinda like an electronic diagram.

IMHO , Apple is not known for a great UI if you are wanting advanced features or are using shortcut key commands. For instance, how were we suppose to know that modals prompt buttons (Do you want to save this?) could be pressed by Cmd+first letter of button label. I think Apple assumes that you are going to use the mouse unless you are geeky enough to add to a discussion of keyboard shortcuts on a blog.

The hardest one for me to figure out when I first got a Mac was the escape key (the NNW -pointing arrow, sometimes presented in a circle ⎋, sometimes not). It’s amazingly difficult to Google for such a thing, and even most of their official keyboard shortcuts pages (like http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1343) don’t mention that icon!

The other thing I find unsettling as a user is that both “alt” and “option” are printed on the same key, ditto with the ⌘ and “Apple”, which sends me back to grade school Apple ][’s with their “Open Apple” and “Closed Apple” keys (why no more closed apples?). And then on the MacBook there’s the Fn key to add into the mix…

Struggled with this just yesterday.

I feel like I’m making a really hard guitar chord when I do these shortcuts.

Funny – I had no problems, whatsoever, learning these…

@Steve Lansing: there is an option in System Preferences to change what Ctrl/Alt/Cmd are mapped to on the keyboard. I recommend it—I think it even remembers for different keyboards as of 10.5. (I used to have to run a script to change it every time I switched between internal and external keyboards.)

@anon: please note the “citation needed” link for that claim in the original article. ;-)

I’m quite surprised at all the comments saying these keys are hard to learn.

Remember, you are using a mac, so there is no Windows key. You can’t compare it to Windows keyboard in any meaningful way. If you think these keystrokes are hard, Emacs and Vim will hurt your brain. These extra combinations are a good thing, because reaching for the mouse constantly can’t be good for your wrists.

If you really have a hard time remembering keystrokes, you can always get Keycue.

I remember that ⌥ is the Option key because it looks a little like an escalator, and an escalator is an option.

Sure, the shortcuts are quite disturbing at the beginning. But you get used to it, time after time after time… As Joshua said, sometimes it really feels like a very hard guitar chord… :D

However, the option symbol has always seemed obvious to me (two separate ways, a railroad, an electric diagram, showing an option, an alternative…).

For the rest, you might find out some answers to your questions on the Apple keyboard here : http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2007/08/11/how-apple-keyboards-lost-a-logo-and-windows-pcs-gained-one/

I agree. The icons are so confusing.

I drew the symbols on my keys in the end.

The symbol for the ⌥ alt key looks like the electronics schematic symbol for a single pole double throw switch. If you put this symbol into a schematic for a circuit it make instant and perfect sense, that of courses raises the question of context; it’s a keyboard, not a schematic but I do think that the icon works well. The key t it depicts an alternative to the natural flow of actions. It’s certainly not as abstract as the command key symbol (why people insist on calling this the apple key is beyond me).

The command key is called the apple key because Apples of old had the open apple and closed apple keys on either side of the space bar. After a bit the command key had just an apple logo printed on them. http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/gadgetlab/Apple_Extended_Keyboard%201.jpg

Those symbols are on the keyboard: http://cl.ly/6b08a4c05eb9e66d7227

All of those symbols are actually printed on all of my Apple keyboards.

(why people insist on calling this the apple key is beyond me)

There has been an Apple icon on that key for decades. They removed it recently.