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Inane? You have readline/emacs keyboard shortcuts out of the box everywhere an app uses a system text box object. Even in Electron apps.


No keypad, no pageup/pagedown/home/end/delete (I use all of them very frequently), arrow keys are misplaced and tiny (also use them a lot), no F1-F12 keys, no screenshot button, funky command key instead of using control key like any sane OS, and the command key is where the option key belongs, blah blah.

Yes, inane.


>funky command key instead of using control key like any sane OS

That "funky" command key makes it so you can copy paste into/out of a terminal with the same keyboard combo you use everywhere else. Ctrl being used to send signals to the terminal and also all over the place for different thingsin the GUI stinks.

Home and End are mapped to C-a and C-e literally everywhere in Cocoa. Same as in the terminal.

Methinks you're just annoyed because it's different than what you're used to. There's nothing wrong with that, but arguing about subjective preferences as if they are objective facts is silly. There's nothing wrong with the Mac's keyboard shortcuts out of the box, and they can all be customized with a NeXTSTEP style plist placed at ~/Library/Keybindings/DefaultKeybindings.dict (There's a default set inside of the AppKit framework bundle's Resources folder, or grab a commented copy here https://github.com/ttscoff/KeyBindings/blob/master/DefaultKe...).

Like, I'm annoyed X and thus all of desktop Linux just copied Windows' dumb keyboard combos that put everything on Ctrl, but that's hardly a reason for me to slag off the entire platform, because its minor, and I can just change them if I really wanted to.


> Home and End are mapped to C-a and C-e literally everywhere in Cocoa.

Even in iOS, if you have a hardware keyboard attached! But Ctrl-a/e have come in with BSD, the more common Mac shortcuts are Cmd-left/right, which go to the beginning/end of the current line, whereas Ctrl-a/e follow wrapped text.


The OS supports all of those keys still. Yeah you don't get them on a laptop keyboard but I rarely use the laptop keyboard as is, it's docked 80+% of the time for me at my desk so I have a nice full size keyboard I use.

Never missed a dedicated screenshot button though, I always just Cmd+Shift+4


Why would you want to use a Control key that's hard to reach when the Command key is right under your thumb?


Sir, that's a you problem.

Control key is easy to reach for me when it's placed in the bottom left corner instead of where it doesn't belong, beside a worse-then-useless Fn key, which is in the control key's place in the bottom left corner, which decides to make random (undocumented, even) functions of so many of the normal keys, and those normal keys don't even have labels for what the Fn key does in that combination like other keys with eg sound, brightness, etc controls.

Fn + A, for example. What the hell is that doing? It opens a fucking emoji window. Do you know how many times I've accidentally control-A to select all and then... oops no more keyboard input unless I press escape, and by the time I realize the mistake, I've already typed a bunch of other things and even more unwanted things happen.

And the control key is where the power key belongs, the command key is where the alt key belongs.

On linux I can type 120+ words/actions per minute on a bad day, around 160 on a good day. On a macbook air? I'm lucky to do an even dozen per minute because I have to slow the fuck down and soooooo many features are missing that I have to actually move a hand to the mouse to figure out a workaround.

Oh speaking of mouse, I literally detest touchpads. Apple's touchpad is not really much better despite the hype. Nothing like trying to position your cursor somewhere then try to click on something but moved the cursor off of it instead. Rinse and repeat until you finally press the touchpad in just the way it likes to activate a button click without also moving the cursor off of the object I wanted to press.


I'm only just now using a Mac again after not using them since elementary school. Tucking my thumbs under the rest of my hand to press the command key is a motion I'm really not used to, while as before I was really used to using my pinky to press/hold the control key often.

I do have to say though, its nice not having to worry about situations where I need to remember some odd shortcut for something that actually supports control characters like text consoles. I never need to worry about "does ctrl+c actually copy here, or does it kill things?" They're just different button presses. I get the logic these days of having those things be different keypresses than control key logic.

A lot of keyboard shortcuts I use daily now feel quite alien because of tucking my thumb under to reach the command key. And boy is it sometimes annoying having so many shortcuts using number keys in them. And the common jump between words or jump to the end or start of a line seem to be backwards in my mind (command+arrow versus option+arrow), I tend to get mixed up on those a bit right now.


The weird thing about "tucking your thumbs" is that you get used to that after a while if you mostly use Apple keyboards, and then you end up trying to do Cmd+C in Windows or Linux.

This is one case where I feel that Apple's take is genuinely more useful for largely historical reasons related to terminals, but at the same time Windows also can't change for legacy reasons of its own, and Apple ends up being this special flower that doesn't work "like most everything else" (i.e. most desktops around - which aren't majority macOS even in countries where it has strong penetration). Basically as soon as you introduce it into the equation, constantly switching back and forth becomes painful.


Its definitely already happening. I almost have to think about hitting Ctrl+C these days when I'm wanting to send a sigint as I'm hitting Ctrl much less than before.


> I never need to worry about "does ctrl+c actually copy here, or does it kill things?"

I've never had that trouble. Terminals are the only place where it's something different, for historical reasons. Copying/pasting in well-designed terminals is shift-control-click, which is easily pressed when the control key is where it belongs. Pinky on control, ring finger on shift, index finger on C.


Terminals are the most common place, I agree. I spend a lot of time in terminals, definitely more than an average user.

> Copying/pasting in well-designed terminals

This implies there are less well designed terminals.that do it otherwise, which is kind of my point. I don't think I've ever done the shortcut you mentioned. Some would copy on select, some on a click on the marked area, some other ways as well. Pasting has been a click, or shift+insert, or Ctrl+shift+v, or a few others.

On a Mac, it's command+c/command+v, everywhere. It's a shortcut that doesn't change.

I'm far from a Mac fanboy but that's a nice little thing.


Not having to think about it is just a nice little win every time. Abort is really very different from copy.




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