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Friday, December 8, 2006
Macs and PCs are just different. Not just at the operating system level, but even at the hardware side as well. I’ve always felt Apple hardware is a superior design in computer technology but its lack of forward delete on its notebooks has been one con to using a Mac. Now, if you have a full sized keyboard, you can use the forward delete above the cursor keys (it has an X inside a forward arrow on it) but us MacBook, MacBook Pro, iBook, and PowerBook users don’t have such a key. Thankfully there are many keyboard mapping applications out there to assist in this problem.
One keyboard mapper I found is DoubleCommand. Doing more than just giving me my beloved forward delete, the freeware application sits in your System Preference’s Other section awaiting your command. Mmm, sorry for the pun. Other cool tricks include turning that ENTER key, down by your space bar and Command key to the right, into a Control, Option, or even a Function key. You can swap keys and their uses as well as make those HOME and END keys act more like they do on a PC. It’s just all good stuff, really!
Hey, I have installed and I’m a happy camper. I know you will be too when you give it a go on your system. Try it out and if you like it, give author, Michael Baltaks, a donation to keep him going.
December 8th, 2006 at 18:31
You can use the “fn” and “delete” keys on the MacBook Pro as stated in the Apple support item: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=86780
December 9th, 2006 at 4:16
Or… you could just hold down the ‘Fn’ key when you press backspace which turns it into a forward delete key anyway…
December 10th, 2006 at 6:34
Don’t you love it when “tech” sites don’t do “research” on their “articles”? As other people have stated, the PowerBook, iBook, MacBook, and MacBook Pro keyboards can do all of these things via the function key. I do it all the time.
December 10th, 2006 at 11:09
Thought I would learn something new. Wasted 2 minutes of my life. How about a little more research & a little less tripe?
December 10th, 2006 at 12:56
Frankly, all the Fn-Del advocates fail to realize that not everyone likes using a two-handed approach for forward-delete. Double Command is an awesome app. It overcomes Apple’s silly keyboard layout for something more natural.
December 11th, 2006 at 15:15
We did research and according to the document we found on Apple’s site, it did not list newer models. Ironically, we never thought to try the Fn key since we found DoubleCommand so quickly. Ironic? Because tried every other common key combination “just for the heck of it” and that was the only one we didn’t. Ya, egg on the face. But as Kevin points out, you can still do a single hand forward delete with DoubleCommand which you can not with the built-in Apple shortcut. Further, we did note some of the other useful features of DoubleCommand not available with OS X out of the box, as well, so don’t know why you didn’t learn anything new Zen. Maybe you need to be added to our writer crew and help us out!
February 10th, 2007 at 22:09
Hi,
I know I’m late to the game on this one, but whenever I hit my function key, my whole screen goes wonky. I’ve been trying to find a way to get my beloved forward delete button back and now I am wonky.
The shift delete key thing doesn’t work on my computer, either. I’m new to mac. I’ve had my macbook for about a week now… I never knew how much I used the forward delete.