The new 16" MacBook Pro keyboard would be perfect if…

[MareLuce]

The MacBook Pro keyboard would be perfect if it had…

A Page Up and Page Down key. Like my favorite Thinkpad laptop keyboard ever.

I want, I need, a precise Page Up and Page Down.

When I’m reading text or spreadsheets or code, I want to page down and see exactly 1 page down of rows or text..
Not a vague swipe down where I have to visually recognize EACH TIME which row starts the new page.

I purchased BTT Better Touch Tool as a hopeful remedy.
With BTT, I remapped:
CommandKeyRight = PageUp
OptionKeyRight = PageDown

At first, I thought it worked. Not really. It works mostly only on web pages.
Not where I really need it.

Ex: In Excel, “page down” goes down 1 line, not 1 page.

If I were just watching movies and surfing the web, this would not matter.

How do you PageUp and PageDown precisely? Is there a secret you know about how to do this? Please share...

 

[terraphantm]

fn + up is page up, fn + down is page down. left and right will be home/end

 

[casperes1996]

fn + up is page up, fn + down is page down. left and right will be home/end

You beat me to it. This has been the Mac way for a long time. I wouldn’t want those page keys around my arrow keys especially. That‘d completely negate the point of going back to an inverted T. I had the extended keyboard with my iMac (the one with 19 F keys). It had dedicated page up and down keys and never used them cause I was so used to fn+arrow anyway

 

[terraphantm]

You beat me to it. This has been the Mac way for a long time. I wouldn’t want those page keys around my arrow keys especially. That‘d completely negate the point of going back to an inverted T. I had the extended keyboard with my iMac (the one with 19 F keys). It had dedicated page up and down keys and never used them cause I was so used to fn+arrow anyway

Yeah I'm super used to it now and always get briefly confused as to why it doesn't work when I use one of my Windows computers. Probably would be helpful for new mac users if Apple marked some of the fn shortcuts... though that would make the keyboard look more cluttered too.

 

[MareLuce]

fn + up is page up, fn + down is page down.

But that's 2 awkward key strokes in combination with each other.
Pinky finger to bottom left. Press and hold.
Pinky right to top right. Press.

Not 1 simple fast no-conscious-thought key stroke.

Plus, my left pinky already feels "overused" from holding down Ctrl key for all the other key combinations where Ctrl- is needed.

 

[poorcody]

You can map shortcuts to the same key differently per application with BTT. So you can map the different page up/down commands to the same keys for Safari and Excel.

EDIT: I may has misread the problem. Please disregard.

 

[chabig]

But that's 2 awkward key strokes in combination with each other.
Pinky finger to bottom left. Press and hold.
Pinky right to top right. Press.

Not 1 simple fast no-conscious-thought key stroke.

Plus, my left pinky already feels "overused" from holding down Ctrl key for all the other key combinations where Ctrl- is needed.

You can use any of your other fingers.

 

[alphaod]

I don't want an inverted T configuration only for them to tack on two extra keys I could accidentally press and almost never use.

 

[MareLuce]

You can map shortcuts to the same key differently per application with BTT. So you can map the different page up/down commands to the same keys for Safari and Excel.

Interesting. Maybe that is the trick...

But what to do differently?

Here is the Better Touch Tool mapping that works perfectly in Chrome or Safari:

What "Assigned Action" mapping would make PageUp, PageDown work in Excel?

All ideas or total guesses appreciated...

I need to page down 200x / day
Having to press 2 keys instead of 1 means 400 keystrokes instead of 200.
Huge deal to my fingers, and a big speed bump in my workflow.

 

[gplusplus]

My only complaint with Apple keyboards is the placement of the ctrl key. Desktop keyboards put them where your pinky can reach, but the laptop keyboards put them in a basically unreachable location, in favor of a function key that is hardly ever used.

 

[casperes1996]

My only complaint with Apple keyboards is the placement of the ctrl key. Desktop keyboards put them where your pinky can reach, but the laptop keyboards put them in a basically unreachable location, in favor of a function key that is hardly ever used.

I use both fn and ctrl a lot actually. Ctrl isn't as oft used on macOS as on Windows anyway. Cmd is more often used. Emacs users often remap control to caps lock though. You might want to do that if it's an annoyance.

 

[gplusplus]

I use both fn and ctrl a lot actually. Ctrl isn't as oft used on macOS as on Windows anyway. Cmd is more often used. Emacs users often remap control to caps lock though. You might want to do that if it's an annoyance.

Sure, macOS itself doesn’t use the ctrl key much, but unix/Linux command line interfaces absolutely do, including the ones built into macOS.

That’s also besides the point that the same company is offering the same keyboard to the same market, but with seemingly arbitrarily different layouts. There’s no reason for the laptop key layout. So now switching between a desktop keyboard and a laptop keyboard is awkward.

 

[junkw]

what would be great would be to split the spacebar in 3 (30%-40-30%) to create LEFT_CMD2 and RIGHT_CMD2 controllable with the thumbs
[automerge]1574039989[/automerge]
remapping capslock is gold.

 

[casperes1996]

Sure, macOS itself doesn’t use the ctrl key much, but unix/Linux command line interfaces absolutely do, including the ones built into macOS.

Absolutely fair point. And as I mentioned, I do use the ctrl key a fair bit as well myself, but for ctrl+scrolling for zoom and the Terminal. I don't think it's placed so badly though, argument in next section.

That’s also besides the point that the same company is offering the same keyboard to the same market, but with seemingly arbitrarily different layouts. There’s no reason for the laptop key layout. So now switching between a desktop keyboard and a laptop keyboard is awkward.

I'd argue there's good reason for that, in that the fn key will more often be used on the laptop.
The extended desktop keyboard for instance has separate page up/down keys, negating the need to use fn for that. It also doesn't have backlight adjustment on the keyboard, making F5 and F6 regular F keys, the two most commonly used F keys. There's also 19 F keys in total, more than enough to map additional functionality without the need for fn. Where on a laptop, you'll way more often need the fn key. Especially when dealing with programs like Maple that'll often have you pres F5. And for a regular user, which mind you still is a much larger userbase than us CLI folk, that tradeoff makes more sense.
[automerge]1574040174[/automerge]

what would be great would be to split the spacebar in 3 (30%-40-30%) to create LEFT_CMD2 and RIGHT_CMD2 controllable with the thumbs
[automerge]1574039989[/automerge]
remapping capslock is gold.

...
Wha? I cannot visualise what you're saying at all

 

[junkw]

Wha? I cannot visualise what you're saying at all

just make the spacebar 50% of its current length to add more keys
goal is to use the thumbs more instead of left pinky for modifier keys

 

[poorcody]

What "Assigned Action" mapping would make PageUp, PageDown work in Excel?

Wouldn't assigning fn-uparrow and fn-downarrow work as assignments?

If you have a Touchbar, this sounds like a classic case of making your own Touchbar buttons as well...

EDIT: I just tried it and it worked. When I press the left Option key all by itself, Excel scrolls down one page. Pretty neat actually.

 

[ScreenSavers]

The space bar is page down in articles and websites...