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Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

There's a project working on exactly that, improved trackpad designs. Support varies between trackpads, but from what I've seen there's a lot of progress in this area.

As far as I know, shortcuts are already pretty much global. Keyboard navigation, copy/paste, open/close/save, it all pretty much follows the same Windows standards. It takes time to learn to use all the shortcuts though, and a lot of them aren't intuitive. I've had the same experience when I tried macOS, none of the shortcuts made sense and behaviour was often non-intuitive coming from a non-Apple platform.

If you're happy with macOS you should totally stick with macOS, but luckily there's people working hard on solving the most glaring issues with modern UIs. Once trackpad support improves, a lot of people might feel a lot better at home than they do right now.

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Command+, to bring up preferences is surefire, does linux/windows have the same yet? I remember Command+W not working as consistently as well.

Word and like jumps in Windows also felt backwards to me, doing the equivalent of w instead of e in vim, and couldn't be consistently combined with shift.

Support for Alt+Dpad(+Shift) and Command+Dpad(+Shift) is important IMO. As well as Double/Triple-click+Drag: it should select additional units not letters.

These last paragraphs are OS-level but the features were missing or inconsistent.

> Command+, to bring up preferences is surefire, does linux/windows have the same yet?

I just tried this in macOS (Catalina), in Chrome while I happened to be looking at a design page in figma.com and nothing happened.

Not so surefire I guess. To be fair - I assume the web page was capturing that shortcut. It worked on the new tab page.

The point though is that this is an app thing, not a macOS thing. If every app on Windows and Linux decided to use the same exact shortcut for opening preferences, then we'd have that. On macOS, Apple does not strictly enforce Cmd+, for opening preferences - any macOS app can use that for whatever they want.

> Word and like jumps in Windows also felt backwards to me...

Jumping words is done with Ctrl+left/right arrow in Windows and Linux. On macOS it's Option+left/right arrow. On all systems, it can be combined with Shift to highlight the word.

> Support for Alt+Dpad(+Shift) and Command+Dpad(+Shift) is important IMO. As well as Double/Triple-click+Drag: it should select additional units not letters.

Not sure what this means, but on my Linux desktops I have absolute freedom to make my keyboard and mouse to do just about anything I can dream of. Meanwhile, in macOS I am often told that if I am not loving the way that Apple has chosen for me to behave, then I must be expecting the wrong thing...

I really miss the compose key functionality from X11 whenever I use Mac or Windows. No need to remember weird number codes or open applets.

Have you checked out Karabiner[0]? I've read[1] about how you can do some pretty neat things with it.

0: https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/

1: https://blog.jkl.gg/hacking-your-keyboard/

You can do very similar things on macOS. `Option+E, A` generates á, `Option-U, U` yields ü, and so forth. There are tons of alternate characters available like this using the Option keys, generally covering the most used glyphs I've needed. Beyond that, the Rocket app is fantastic for finding and inserting emojis and more complicated emoticons by human-friendly name.

That’s not the same, that’s basically just AltGr. In X you can do ‘Compose, o, o’ → °, ‘Compose, C, o’ → ©’, ‘Compose, s, o’ → §, ‘Compose p o o’ → «a character HN doesn’t allow (U1F4A9)» and ~6000¹ other combinations. X also has a “mac” layout variant I’d like to hear a macOS user’s opinion of (haven’t ever wanted to use it myself).

[1]: ± some depending on if you count multiple ways of creating the same character, etc. Eg. ‘≠’ can be made by combining / and = in either order. Also ‘Compose, number, s’ for footnotes, ‘Compose, +, -’ → ±, ‘Compose , <, '’ → “‘”, ‘Compose, -, >’ → “→”, ‘Compose, =, >” → “⇒” are nice. And υɳⅰеηⅽоⅾе.

I just tried Cmd-, in both Safari and Chrome, and in both cases it brought up preferences. That a website might interrupt that doesn't prevent it from being a MacOS standard.

it all pretty much follows the same Windows standards

This is why I don't use Linux on the desktop. (About half of my servers are Linux.)

Every couple of years I'll bring out my old HP laptop and spend most of a week installing all the newest desktop environments to see how they've progressed. I'm always disappointed.

I've been counting on Linux to be the big disruptor for two decades now. But more and more it's just becoming the poor man's Windows, by aping Windows conventions.

If I want Windows, I'll run Windows. If I want macOS, I'll run macOS. What I want is something different, not something that tries to be a watered-down version of both.

There are so many possible graphical environments on Linux. Gnome for all its faults isn't really windows lite. KDE has a LOT more functionality built in than windows is liable to just with kwin. With KDE + compiz + plugins the amount of functionality explodes, if you enable the close animation where all windows break into pieces and fly off screen literally.

In 2009ish I had a ui where you could zoom out to a giant wall and rearrange all the windows on your virtual desktops and use a macish expose to bound to a mouse key to pick from the windows on the current desktop. The visual metaphor was better than macs and windows and to boot there were so many knobs you could tweak virtually anything.

Tiling window managers like i3wm and 17 more are both minimal and powerful. Notably i3 has MUCH more powerful keybindings and treats individual monitors as virtual desktops.

With xmonad your window manager is a haskell program with awesome a lua one.

If you want to go all in on emacs you can make it your window manager too.

Honestly its only windows lite if you want it to be so and really everyone is basically xerox lite to some degree or another because we are basically using the same basic metaphors described therein.

I've actually seen the trackpad project which is really cool. The issue I had with shortcuts was finding consistency across different software, the basics but also all the text manipulation shortcuts that exist globally on macOS, it felt as though everytime I downloaded something new I needed to set it up again. It's quite possible I hadn't configured everything correctly though.

I'm using Linux distros for like 10 years now and recently I (again) didn't even know how to close a window. Is it Super+W? Super+Q? Alt+F4? All of those 3 might work. How do I access app preferences? Ctrl+Alt+P? Ctrl+Alt+O? Ctrl+Alt+S? You know, because "preferences", "options" and "settings". All those shortcuts work depending on the app.

At least Linux and Windows shortcuts are easier to remember as they start with basically words, not a combination of weird symbols you never learn cause you never look at them (cause who looks at the keyboard when they type).

Not everyone is English speaking. Mac shortcuts are very easy to remember because they are consistent. I'm not sure what weird symbols are we speaking about? Cmd and Option buttons? They have both a symbol and a name. What about Ctrl and Alt? What's the difference?

I used to hate Mac shortcuts, because I never really spent more than 30 minutes with the system. I think there is nothing to hate - they are just different and IMO better.

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