I got a Lenovo Thinkpad recently and this part of the keyboard layout is really messing with my muscle memory. But since Thinkpads had always had this going back to the IBM days, before I rag on it, I want to know what other people think of it. What benefits does it have, and do you personally like the design choice?
I couldn’t get used to it, that left ctrl has been engraved in my brain by decades of use and I’m very keyboard-oriented. Just kept missing commands and it broke my flow. At the time thought they got carried away copying macs, but looks like they’ve been doing it since the early 90s. Read that the benefit was to make Fn more accessible but…yeah what about ctrl now? I barely ever use Fn. I ended up switching the keys, even physically swapping the Fn with the right Ctrl.
I rarely use the function key. I don’t like the windows key. I just remap anything if it annoys me, so I don’t really mind. I say this on a T500, so its not like any change to current models will affect me for another 10 years or so.
I liked it quite a bit, I have my first non-Thinkpad in years and it still trips up my muscle memory having the buttons in the “correct” order.
You could reassign the keys in the BIOS settings option last I heard, I never knew a reason for it but was never personally bothered by it.
I rarely if ever use the Fn key, but I also remapped the Ctrl to the CapsLock key. This way I don’t have to twist my wrist to get to it.
Just do what feels most comfortable for you, it’s not worth it fighting with your keyboard. Life’s hard enough sometimes.
Before you told this, I never had noticed that. Went to the other room and yes, the left Ctrl is the second button in the row. Actually, my other HP laptop has the left Ctrl as the leftmost button and I feel no difference, the numpad on the HP is annoying me much more as the rest of the keyboard is shifted to the left compared with the ThinkPad and switching laptops make me type neighboring buttons.
My thought too. I never even noticed until I read this post. Safe to say it doesn’t bother me. I rarely use the Fn key. Interesting to know now though!
Maybe this is just a quirk of how I type, but when I want to press the ctrl key, my pinkie just feels around for the key on the bottom left corner, so it not being the ctrl key really messes with me.
I change keyboard layouts using Alt+Shift, not Ctrl+Shift, so maybe that’s another reason why I don’t notice.
I don’t like the design choice and all my thinkpads have them swapped to normal in the boot menu.
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