Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheAceOfHearts | Hacker News Reader

I dislike CDE. IMO, Motif was sabotaged by Microsoft's involvement. This is a very minor point, but I will never accept ALT+F4 as a sensible hotkey for exiting apps. I think macOS picked the best hotkey defaults.

Anyone interested in this should also check out OpenStep [0]. I've been researching this area heavily during the past year and I'm constantly amazed by all the revolutionary work that got done at NeXT and Sun. It's a damn shame they didn't win bigger mindshare.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep

View on HN

Indeed. I've spent the better part of probably 100 hours configuring KDE Neon + apps + Emacs w/ a bunch of custom keyboard shortcuts, kwin rules, etc. to do my level best to get my home and work Linux machines to have sane, memorable keyboard interfaces. After a ton of effort and some oddities (kwin rules on window-class don't seem to trigger for Firefox for some reason) it mostly works. Mostly.

One of the big benefits of the Mac-style shortcuts scheme is that there's no conflict between terminal commands and everything else... because things like Ctrl-C aren't overloaded, and I don't have to contextually remember to use Ctrl-Shift-C when in a terminal.

I've said it before, but I'd pay non-trivial amounts of money for a Linux distribution that went to significant length to configure, compile, or otherwise mimic Mac-like shortcuts in its desktop environment and packaged applications.

This is also one of the main reasons why I prefer mac over Linux even for serverside development and operations. MacOS Terminal is just exactly what I want from a terminal. It’s curious that no linux desktop seems to have achieved that yet.

The other main reason for me is PDF support, but that gets buggier on mac with every release sadly. It seems to have reached its peak around 10.4 where OSX finally got really good.

Funny, I feel the opposite – certain keystrokes just don't work in Mac OS terminal (ex. Page Up/Down, Control+arrow keys), breaking my editor of choice – and Preview is surprisingly slow, crashy, and difficult to navigate with (ex. page numbers don't line up).

Whereas on Linux, my terminal (urxvt) behaves perfectly w/r/t keystrokes (though I wish I could increase/decrease the font size with a keyboard shortcut), and Evince is the most perfect PDF reader I've ever used (fast, and gets page numbers correct).

What OS you prefer is highly dependent on what you emphasise. From your examples, I don't care about paging in Terminal, and word-jumps work throughout MacOS using alt-arrow-left/right. Preview is indeed crashy and slow but it's still the only one that gives me the editing features I want out-of-the box without installing Adobe Creator tools. More importantly, MacOS (and its predecessor NextStep) is AFAIK still the only system that can create lossless PDFs out of anything you see on screen. The fact that I can open a PDF, make a rectangular selection and copy&paste to native MacOS applications while keeping images, vector graphics and fonts at full quality (i.e. you can zoom in without aliasing forever!) is a big part of my workflow when documenting stuff.

Until you use a non English keyboard. Alt-F4 is perfectly acceptable OSX has its own share of stupid key bindings especially where the browser is concerned.

The main thing that irks me on Macs is the non-standard behavior of the Home and End keys. I expect them to go the beginning or end of the line I'm typing, and in every other system they do, whereas in MacOS they usually scroll to the top or bottom of the entire page.

Basic emacs keybindings work in most MacOS text boxes. CTRL-A goes to the beginning of the line, CTRL-E the end, CTRL-P prior line, CTRL-F forward, CTRL-B backwards, CTRL-N next line. I think this was originally a NEXTSTEP thing.

http://unix-kb.cat-v.org/

As that page notes, C-a and C-e are not just Emacs bindings; and are even in Vi. However, the other bindings mentioned are Emacs bindings; and macOS textareas do support Emacs keybindings (on ctrl, not cmd), and that includes C-a and C-e.

I believe the comment about NeXTSTEP was not that the keybindings originated there, but that NeXTSTEP implemented Emacs keybindings in textareas, and that macOS inherited that (I don't know about the accuracy of that though).

Oh, and the page said "Rob Pike answers in 9fans: “I believe ^H ^W ^U date back at least to TENEX.”"; it seems odd to me that he didn't mention that 'H' with the control bit flipped is literally the ASCII "backspace" control character.

Yeah, the thing that irks me is when C-a and C-e don’t work. (Most things support it these days, but I’m afraid it’ll be less prevalent in the coming years as fewer people are familiar with emacs.)

I love reading about the end of the commercial UNIX wars. Definitely watch this documentary filmed during a NeXT company retreat, if you haven't: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNeXlJW70KQ

I think the most stunning thing is that NeXTStep basically won in the end, and has far more mindshare today than anyone would have ever imagined...

But yeah, it was way better than CDE and Motif in it's day, but still on the margins.

I used CDE when Motif was still state-of-the-art in X, and it was by far the best unix desktop environment I had used up to that point.

Yes, as dated as it looks now, it was the first unix desktop that felt 'polished' to me up to that point. It's also the first desktop I had that was in colour though, so maybe that's part of it.

I just installed it on my OpenBSD laptop for when I actually need X (it's rare) and it's a joy to use.

I've used every other wm under the sun and I end up spending more time configuring my damn window manager more than getting work done. So much lost productivity vs just not using them to begin with.

CDE still does one thing that no other wm seems to be able to do: completely consistent behavior everywhere

Cmd+Q is awful IMO. It's too easy to hit accidentally trying to do Cmd+Tab.

Or Cmd+W. The amount of times I've gone to close a tab and ended up quitting :-D

I do this at least once a week. So annoying.

Every time people tell me they like MacOS shortcuts I look at them with a bit of stink eye. They're about as anti-muscle memory and as "shortcuts that shouldn't be next to each other" as key combinations can get.

Great, they're very easy to learn, but not so great to retain and use. I'm going to be spending the rest of my career looking up on SO the bottom 75% of the shortcuts I need to use. Thanks guys. Thanks Steve.

I disagree that they're difficult to retain and use. I've learned how to use both sets of shortcuts, as I sometimes move between macOS, Linux (Ubuntu), and Windows. Regardless, macOS shortcuts are my favorite.

In my experience, shortcuts are more consistent on macOS than on Linux and Windows.

When I first tried macOS I thought its shortcuts were the worst thing ever. But after giving it a genuine try for a few weeks, I immediately fell in love with em.

You can find the macOS shortcuts on the Mac keyboard shortcuts [0] support page. If you're interested in more details, you can learn about the guiding principles by reading the Human Interface Guidelines Keyboard article [1].

Even if you disagree with some of their design decisions, I'd still highly recommend reading through their Human Interface Guidelines articles. It's an amazing resource.

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236

[1] https://developer.apple.com/macos/human-interface-guidelines...

This isn't usually a problem for me. However, one way in which macOS combats this is by encouraging applications to preserve their state between sessions. That means even if you were to accidentally exit, you can just re-open it without problems. This also helps protect you in the case of a system crash (incredibly rare, in my experience) or accidental power loss.

ctrl-W to close windows is worse. I can't count the number of times I tried erase-word-backwards and closed the browser or other window instead.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com