macOS Sierra: The Missing Manual

The Mac Keyboard

All through this book, you’ll find references to certain keys on Apple’s keyboards. “Hold down the key,” you might read, or “Press Control-F2.” If you’re coming from Mac OS 9, from Windows, or even from a typewriter, you might be a bit befuddled.

To make any attempt at an explanation even more complicated, Apple’s keyboards keep changing. The one you’re using right now is probably one of these models:

• The current keyboards, where the keys are flat little jobbers that poke up through square holes in the aluminum (Figure 7-1). That’s what you get on current laptops, wired keyboards, and Bluetooth wireless keyboards.

• The old, plastic desktop keyboards, or the white or black plastic laptop ones.

Here, then, is a guided tour of the non-typewriter keys on the modern Mac keyboard:

Tip

To see closeups of Apple’s current wired and wireless keyboards, visit www.apple.com/keyboard.

• fn. How are you supposed to pronounce fn? Not “function,” certainly; after all, the F-keys on the top row are already known as function keys. And not “fun”; goodness knows, the fn key isn’t particularly hilarious to press.

  What it does, though, is quite clear: It changes the purpose of certain keys. That’s a big deal on laptops, which don’t have nearly as many keys as desktop keyboards. So for some of the less commonly used functions, you’re supposed to press fn and a regular key. (For example, fn turns ...