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>Stuck between the Command and Control (ctrl, or ^) keys, the Option key, also called Alt key, because of the switch symbol ... that adorns it No. It's called

>Stuck between the Command and Control (ctrl, or ^) keys, the Option key, also called Alt key, because of the switch symbol ... that adorns it No. It's called the option key because it was named that on the original 1984 Mac, full stop. It had one purpose: as an auxiliary shift key, giving access to additional characters and to accents via combos. It's never called the "Alt Key", at least not on MacOS. IIRC the option key had the word "Alt" above it in the late 1990s primarily to provide some keyboard compatibility with virtual machines etc. that ran Windows 95: in this case, the Option Key served as the IBM PC's Alt key. Later USB Mac keyboards were set up to map Alt and Option to the same keymapping so Mac keyboards could be used on PCs and vice versa. New Macs no longer include the word "Alt". What you're calling the "switch symbol" didn't show up until much, much later. And the symbol is not called the "switch symbol". It's called the Option Key Symbol, Unicode U2325. I doubt it's meant to imply "switching" of launching options. It's worth mentioning that the NeXT workstation keyboards also had Option keys that worked effectively identically top the Mac. Late-model Apple IIs had open- and close-apple keys and supposedly the close-apple key served the same function, but I'm not convinced. > It is (almost) never used alone, but in combination with other keys, to launch various actions. The primary function of the option key has always been as a second shift key. But just like the shift and control and function keys, the option key can be used as a modifier key for the command key. Various apps have come to use it for their own unusual purposes as well. This has a long history: even the original MacPaint used the option key in combination with mouse clicks to do alternative things (same thing with the shift key). This notion of multiple shift/modifier keys is quite old: the author might look up the concept of the "bucky bit". The author also seems to have neglected a HUGE use of the option key in Terminal.app: as Emacs's META key.

derefr 3y ago
> And the symbol is not called the "switch symbol". It's called the Option Key Symbol, Unicode U2325. I doubt it's meant to imply "switching" of launching options. It doesn't matter what it's called in Unicode, it is literally the symbol for an (open) switch in an electrical wiring diagram. It's trying to invoke that bit of adjacent-domain "visual jargon" to imply to people who are first-time computer users — but who have experience with electronics — what the key will do / what it is used for. It's a switch; it switches the function of other keys! And it doesn't just switch the function of commands; it also switches the function of typing regular keys — i.e. it momentarily switches your keyboard layout to a second, alternative "page" of the same keyboard layout (which is essentially the same as the "Alt Gr" key in Windows.)
- SeanLuke 3y ago
  So do shift, control, and function, in these same contexts. Like these modifier keys, Option's primary function isn't "switching the function of other keys". Its primary function is, and always has been, as a secondary shift key for entering text.
  - derefr 3y ago
    "Secondary shift key" is a bad model for it, though; the Shift key has a very specific meaning (ever since typewriters): it temporarily shifts an imaginary "selector" within the keymap matrix between the lower-case vs upper-case "rows" of the keymap; with the aim that it should be either intuitive or visually evident on the keyboard, what the "upper-case equivalent" of a given lower-case character is. Option in its AltGr ("Alternative Graphics"!) form doesn't do anything so intuitive; the symbols it gives you have no clear relation to your keymap, and often aren't printed on the keys, either. This is because Option/AltGr comes from an entirely different heritage and thought process. IIRC, way back when, there were actually electromechanical typewriters with support for loading in two fonts — two separate literal matrixes of letterpress metal glyphs. I think some of the later IBM Selectrics (the ones that have the font on a "ball" and rotate it around to select the glyph) could do this. These had an AltGr-Lock kind of key, that would switch the active font — literally juggling the balls around inside the typewriter. Some would use this to just switch between e.g. roman vs italic fonts within the same font family; or to switch between "compatible" font families from the same type foundry, where the same glyphs occur in the same positions. But others, working in multi-language environments, would use this to quickly switch between fonts of font-families designed for entirely different scripts. You could have a latin-script font loaded in as primary, and a greek-script or cyrillic-script font loaded in as secondary. Obviously, in these cases, the glyphs on your keyboard would only be accurate for (at most!) one of the languages you're using. You'd just have to touch-type the other. Computer Option/AltGr keys, when they were invented, did essentially the digital version of the same thing. They weren't for selecting different glyphs from a single coherent glyph-set; rather, they were for momentarily switching between a primary and secondary glyph-set, that have nothing to do with one-another and might actually have many redundant glyphs between them. This was a result of PC hardware OEMs doing customer discovery for addressable markets, and finding that many markets either had one dominant language with a lot of characters; or ~two dominant languages, each with not-that-many characters. This in turn resulted in two alternate realities, where which reality you experienced depended on your market: 1. The evolution of computers that shipped with an OS with a single built-in "code page" that was a fixed combination of a primary and secondary script into a single 8-bit repertoire; with a keyboard layout where AltGr would be a momentary switch to let you type characters from the secondary script; and where characters from both scripts could be on screen at once, as they were actually all part of the same page; and 2. the evolution of computers that shipped with an OS with multiple supported "code pages", where each code-page was entirely dedicated to a single script; and where some key combination would allow you to switch the active code page for the entire OS (possibly restarting the shell in the process.) This would allow you to alternatively work on documents in multiple different scripts, but never to combine scripts in a single document†. Computers in these markets didn't get an AltGr key. † Unless one of the scripts did something very clever, like Shift-JIS did: the "Shift" in the name is to indicate that, somewhat like UCS-2, all the thousands of two-byte https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JIS_X_0208 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JIS_X_0208 characters are encoded using only surrogates from the upper 128 slots of the SJIS code page — leaving the lower 128 free to be a (rough) mirror of ASCII.
JimDabell 3y ago
> It's never called the "Alt Key", at least not on MacOS. IIRC the option key had the word "Alt" above it in the late 1990s They continued doing this until relatively recently; here’s a photo of an Apple keyboard released in the last ten years: https://images.macworld.co.uk/cmsdata/features/3462401/Mac_keyboard_800home.jpg https://images.macworld.co.uk/cmsdata/features/3462401/Mac_k... I think they might have stopped doing it around the time they released the wireless versions with the Lightning port. Pretty sure the wireless versions with AA batteries had “Alt” on them.
- Findecanor 3y ago
  > I think they might have stopped doing it around the time they released the wireless versions with the Lightning port. According to some unattributed blurbs on Wikipedia, the "alt" sublegend would have disappeared in 2017, when the first-generation "Magic Keyboard with Numeric Keypad" replaced the full-sized "Apple Keyboard" in the image you linked to. The first compact "Magic Keyboard" had "alt" when it was introduced in 2015, as can be seen in reviews on the web from that year. But ... Those are the US-English variants. There are also many keyboards with other regional layouts and those have sometimes had slightly different legends on modifier keys.

derefr 3y ago

> And the symbol is not called the "switch symbol". It's called the Option Key Symbol, Unicode U2325. I doubt it's meant to imply "switching" of launching options. It doesn't matter what it's called in Unicode, it is literally the symbol for an (open) switch in an electrical wiring diagram. It's trying to invoke that bit of adjacent-domain "visual jargon" to imply to people who are first-time computer users — but who have experience with electronics — what the key will do / what it is used for. It's a switch; it switches the function of other keys! And it doesn't just switch the function of commands; it also switches the function of typing regular keys — i.e. it momentarily switches your keyboard layout to a second, alternative "page" of the same keyboard layout (which is essentially the same as the "Alt Gr" key in Windows.)

SeanLuke 3y ago
So do shift, control, and function, in these same contexts. Like these modifier keys, Option's primary function isn't "switching the function of other keys". Its primary function is, and always has been, as a secondary shift key for entering text.
- derefr 3y ago
  "Secondary shift key" is a bad model for it, though; the Shift key has a very specific meaning (ever since typewriters): it temporarily shifts an imaginary "selector" within the keymap matrix between the lower-case vs upper-case "rows" of the keymap; with the aim that it should be either intuitive or visually evident on the keyboard, what the "upper-case equivalent" of a given lower-case character is. Option in its AltGr ("Alternative Graphics"!) form doesn't do anything so intuitive; the symbols it gives you have no clear relation to your keymap, and often aren't printed on the keys, either. This is because Option/AltGr comes from an entirely different heritage and thought process. IIRC, way back when, there were actually electromechanical typewriters with support for loading in two fonts — two separate literal matrixes of letterpress metal glyphs. I think some of the later IBM Selectrics (the ones that have the font on a "ball" and rotate it around to select the glyph) could do this. These had an AltGr-Lock kind of key, that would switch the active font — literally juggling the balls around inside the typewriter. Some would use this to just switch between e.g. roman vs italic fonts within the same font family; or to switch between "compatible" font families from the same type foundry, where the same glyphs occur in the same positions. But others, working in multi-language environments, would use this to quickly switch between fonts of font-families designed for entirely different scripts. You could have a latin-script font loaded in as primary, and a greek-script or cyrillic-script font loaded in as secondary. Obviously, in these cases, the glyphs on your keyboard would only be accurate for (at most!) one of the languages you're using. You'd just have to touch-type the other. Computer Option/AltGr keys, when they were invented, did essentially the digital version of the same thing. They weren't for selecting different glyphs from a single coherent glyph-set; rather, they were for momentarily switching between a primary and secondary glyph-set, that have nothing to do with one-another and might actually have many redundant glyphs between them. This was a result of PC hardware OEMs doing customer discovery for addressable markets, and finding that many markets either had one dominant language with a lot of characters; or ~two dominant languages, each with not-that-many characters. This in turn resulted in two alternate realities, where which reality you experienced depended on your market: 1. The evolution of computers that shipped with an OS with a single built-in "code page" that was a fixed combination of a primary and secondary script into a single 8-bit repertoire; with a keyboard layout where AltGr would be a momentary switch to let you type characters from the secondary script; and where characters from both scripts could be on screen at once, as they were actually all part of the same page; and 2. the evolution of computers that shipped with an OS with multiple supported "code pages", where each code-page was entirely dedicated to a single script; and where some key combination would allow you to switch the active code page for the entire OS (possibly restarting the shell in the process.) This would allow you to alternatively work on documents in multiple different scripts, but never to combine scripts in a single document†. Computers in these markets didn't get an AltGr key. † Unless one of the scripts did something very clever, like Shift-JIS did: the "Shift" in the name is to indicate that, somewhat like UCS-2, all the thousands of two-byte https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JIS_X_0208 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JIS_X_0208 characters are encoded using only surrogates from the upper 128 slots of the SJIS code page — leaving the lower 128 free to be a (rough) mirror of ASCII.

JimDabell 3y ago

> It's never called the "Alt Key", at least not on MacOS. IIRC the option key had the word "Alt" above it in the late 1990s They continued doing this until relatively recently; here’s a photo of an Apple keyboard released in the last ten years: https://images.macworld.co.uk/cmsdata/features/3462401/Mac_keyboard_800home.jpg https://images.macworld.co.uk/cmsdata/features/3462401/Mac_k... I think they might have stopped doing it around the time they released the wireless versions with the Lightning port. Pretty sure the wireless versions with AA batteries had “Alt” on them.

Findecanor 3y ago
> I think they might have stopped doing it around the time they released the wireless versions with the Lightning port. According to some unattributed blurbs on Wikipedia, the "alt" sublegend would have disappeared in 2017, when the first-generation "Magic Keyboard with Numeric Keypad" replaced the full-sized "Apple Keyboard" in the image you linked to. The first compact "Magic Keyboard" had "alt" when it was introduced in 2015, as can be seen in reviews on the web from that year. But ... Those are the US-English variants. There are also many keyboards with other regional layouts and those have sometimes had slightly different legends on modifier keys.