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Comment by AnIdiotOnTheNet | Hacker News Reader

How we made it to 2021 without having per-application rebindable keys built in to our OSs is just one of many mysteries of how personal computing came to suck I guess.

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OSX's Keyboard prefs lets you define custom menu shortcuts for any program. Sadly there's no global interface for stuff like "hold this to zoom" so you still have to deal with whatever the program's developer thought sounded good.

In the Gnome 2.x days, you could (in GTK apps) assign a custom keystroke to any item in any pull-down menu by hovering over the item and then pressing the keystroke you wanted to assign. It was the most simple, intuitive way to customize app keyboard shortcuts I've ever seen, and I still miss it.

> It was the most simple, intuitive way to customize app keyboard shortcuts I've ever seen

IFF you knew about it. Gnome X.X has always suffered from poor interface intuitivity, while simultaneously having some great UI/UX features.

My OS has that (KDE) sort of. Non-KDE apps don't use it because it's OS-dependent.

You'd need all platforms to have this and then a multiplatform abstraction layer to exist before it became useful... and by useful I mean: you can start rewriting every application.

Not really, you just need something like AutoHotKey that can intercept and re-write key events. Since the OS is responsible for delivering key events, the application's cooperation is not required.

If you ask me, multiplatform abstraction layers are part of the problem with this industry, not the solution.

That might work, but then the OS needs up-to-date profiles for each application (to know what to map events to), and changing the shortcut in the application's own settings would break everything (in addition to showing the wrong thing in the first place).

Isn't this kind of what Apple is trying to do with the TouchBar?

Shame that the TouchBar is hot garbage.

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