Hard to love the Mac

[pythonista]

I'm trying, I really am. And I have found plenty of things I like about Macs. I just keep running into things that I very much don't.

One small thing Apple could do to vastly increase its chance of converting me is to allow the key repeat rate to be much, much higher; at least for the damn backspace... oops, I mean delete key.

Comments

[doubleyou]

I also have issues with the key repeat rate. I thought it was a problem with X Windows, and I juts needed to find the right X resource or stty setting. But now you have me wondering whether it's MacOS itself that's getting in my way. Years ago, I could totally fly with the backspace key on a vt100 terminal. In fact, I had to be careful because I could delete most of the line before I could react, if I wasn't paying enough attention.

I do love Macs, and definitely prefer them over Windows. But I'm a bit alarmed by the direction they seem to be going. If they start to push the walled-garden cloud-based approach of the iPad/iPhone onto their laptops and desktop OS machines, then I'm jumping ship. The latest OS update has already introduced an app-store program to the desktop. Let's hope that's as far as it goes.

[pythonista]

I am pretty sure it's a Mac OS thing. Besides my own fiddling (I managed to find some kind of preferences "control panel" and the key repeat was already set to max), I read a Mac forum thread in which a longtime Windows user who bought a Mac asks longtime Mac users if he's missed some easy way to adjust the key repeat rate... and receives a response along the lines of "of course not; everything about the Mac is perfect; the Mac knows best; you should be using a different method of deleting more than a few characters at a time; just get used to it".