Hello, I’m a reject

I got my first PC in 1986; it was the upmarket model with the colour screen and the 40 MB hard disk (which I could only access as a single drive by running a non-standard version of DOS). I couldn’t get a PC that took the old floppies as well as the 3.5″ kind, but not for want of asking. I like backward compatibility.

I got my second PC in 1996, mainly to get online with. A 1 GB hard drive and a 100 MHz Pentium seemed pretty whizzy at the time, but by 2005 it was creaking badly. So I upgraded, this time to a Mac.

I’d never used a Mac before, but I found the switch surprisingly easy. I got used to a single-button mouse – and to pressing the splat key when I wanted a right-click – quite quickly. Not being able to Alt- to the menu bar was more irritating, and I couldn’t work out why I couldn’t delete files with the key labelled ‘delete’. Mostly good, though.

Some time later: the file-deleting thing was still bugging me, so I poked around a bit. OS X Help says you delete files by dragging them to Trash. Cheers. Some page somewhere suggested splat-delete. I tried it. It didn’t work. I asked around among Mac-using friends. Everyone told me it did work. Oh well, maybe I’ve got a duff keyboard.

Last month, the bottom row of the numeric keypad stopped working, probably owing to coffee, toast crumbs etc. I was pleasantly surprised to find my AppleCare cover entitles me to get a new one delivered (and maybe splat-delete will work on the new one!).

The new keyboard arrived two days ago. The numeric keypad works perfectly. Splat-delete doesn’t.

I do some serious poking around. (Maybe Apple are so keen on getting people to drag files to Trash that they’ve disabled splat-delete in the latest release?)

I notice that the Finder’s ‘File’ menu shows a key combination with a hollow arrow with an X in it. I’ve only got one key with a hollow arrow with an X in it; it’s the one labelled ‘delete’. The arrow points the other way, though. Funny.

I’m mystified by a page which advises newbies to use command+delete to delete files, then adds ‘the delete key, NOT the del key’. I’ve got a key labelled ‘delete’ – it’s the one I’ve been trying to use all this time – but there is no ‘del’ key.

I find an Apple page which makes a similar distinction, only this one refers to the ‘delete’ key and the ‘delfwd’ key. It further explains that the ‘delete’ key deletes the character to the left of the cursor. Light dawns.

So: the key labelled with the word ‘delete’, which is in a similar position to and acts exactly the same way as the ‘delete’ key on a PC keyboard, is not the ‘delete’ key. The ‘delete’ key is the big key with the long left-pointing arrow, which looks the same, is in the same position and has exactly the same function as the BACKSPACE key on a PC keyboard.

I don’t know why I didn’t realise that before.

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