Recently going over the Haiku translations, I’ve noticed that still after 3 years using Haiku regularly, I have still not fully understood what to make of Haiku key labels.
On the Keymap preference panel, the standard layout describes Ctrl as Ctrl, Win/Super/Cmd as Option, and Alt as Command. However, the menu items use the ALT labelling to describe the Command key. Moreover, various strings include ALT string to refer to the Command key. This is utterly confusing. Plus, I am not sure if the menu items are localisable, causing more confusion on keyboard layouts that use different labelling.
Also I have noticed that the Keymap preferences label the Option key as Win/Command key on the modifier selection window, causing additional confusion.
I think we need to ditch the ALT naming scheme completely and go forward only using Haiku-specific naming. Which is:
For Windows themed keyboards:
- Ctrl for Ctrl
- Win/Super/Cmd as Option
- Alt as Command
and we need to tweak all strings in the interface and the user guide to reflect this as such.
For Mac themed keyboards:
- There is no need for a change here. Since BeOS took inspiration from the Macintosh, this suits us perfectly.
For Windows/Linux users, this will surely create confusion at first, but we ought to treat this as a Haiku-specific quirk that the new users should get used to. Maybe we can introduce our own Haiku-themed keyboard sticker merch, or sticker templates.
However, on current Macintosh keyboards, the Command and Option keys do not act as expected, this even differs on left and right Command/Option keys. This will need fixing.