Special keys for copy/paste/find...

[jafd]

Many of you probably know that Sun keyboards have this block of keys on their left, where they’ve got dedicated keys for undo/redo, cut/copy/paste et cetera. These even have keycodes in the USB HID standard.

(And a real Compose key. Man, but I dream of wiring up a mechanical Sun-style keyboard one day!)

So I took an M122 keyboard, and mapped the lefthand function keys to those. And on Linux, which is my daily driver, it even worked without having to tweak anything (too much).

There were, however, programs which didn’t budge. For example, Google Chrome. The keys work inside the pages themselves just fine, but not in the browser’s UI. You cannot paste into the address bar using the “Paste” key. You cannot customize shortcuts for the browser’s UI either.

And there’s MacOS, of course.

I’m wondering if there is a way to make sufficiently advanced macros (say, for Soarer’s firmware) that would work in a cross-platform fashion (have different OS modes?)

Also, this day and age seems to not favor 122-key keyboards, 60% sometimes being more versatile. How do you make sure you don’t end up with unused areas on your keyboards? Any tips?