I’ve also been having a great time reinstalling software. I use this program called DoubleCommand to reassign the extra “enter” key to act like a forward delete because I could never get used to “function-backspace” to do the same thing. There is a real danger in reassigning keys on your keyboard–you get used to it, and when you are on other keyboards on other computers, you make mistakes. Imagine: earlier today I kept hitting this enter key expecting it to delete when instead it would submit a form or start a new line. Dumb.

I couldn’t remember what that utility was called, so I searched for it, and found this hilarious forum thread. Some guy had a broken space bar (on his kids’ computer) and wanted to reassign some other key to act as the space rather than buy a new keyboard. While some suggested key remapping programs like DoubleCommand, others severely chided this guy for potentially ruining his children’s future typing ability and thus education, career, etc.

Here is a 10 minute snippit of one of those sessions. This student, we’ll call her Ellen, is a straight-A student looking to transfer to a four-year college and major in English and Spanish. I asked her to find information about those two programs.

Toward the end of the video she explained to me that she expected both of those program websites to be structured similarly.