Comment by eitland | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eitland | Hacker News Reader

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> and be as consistent as my old Macs.

Would it help if I point out that this is just rose tinted glasses? ;-)

Or at least, when I used Mac full time back in 2009 - 2012, it was the least consistent thing I ever used: even such basic shortcuts as moving a word forward or backwards was inconsistent. Same with home/end: in one app it would be CMD + arrow left/right, in another it would be fn + arrow left/right. In Safari CMD + left meant back which kind of made sense but was hugely annoying when I filed out a web form in Oracle Enterprise Manager or something, wanted to select to the start of the line and ended up leaving the form, discarding half an hours work.

(Yes, bad web application. Feel free to tell Oracle that.)

That said, I kind of like Apple when they aren't messing up keyboards physically or logically and aren't busy snooping in my pictures. I've convinced my wife to use iPhone and switched most of my kids phones to iPhones and even use one myself and have bought a Mac mini lately - it is good as long as one can take it slowly, one careful step at a time - definitely not something I'd want to deal with in anger or if my life or the customers data depend on it.

And consistent - it is not!

I’ve been using Macs since 2009 for programming and have always used _by default_ Option+arrows in all apps for jumping between words and Cmd+arrow for beginning and end of line/file. I have never experienced “fn” to be used for moving the cursor around. It’s interesting that you had a different experience since these have been OS defaults and you can change them of course. I wonder if these was another software which messed with your shortcuts?

The things I remember using for work back then was eclipse, Textedit(not sure about the name, but at least the simple text editor that came with Mac), Safari, Firefox and Chrome.

Eclipse, Firefox, and Chrome use non-native text controls to varying degrees. That may have been your issue. Apple can’t do anything about bad third-party software.

It's been a while since I used a Mac but my recollection is that the same Emacs style key bindings were available for all text fields pretty much without exception.

https://jblevins.org/log/kbd

Thanks, this might come in useful at some point.

That said, on Windows and in Linux this is extremely much simpler and more consistent, I can write it down right here and now, it doesn't need a full web page:

arrow keys: move

ctrl + arrow left/right: move left/right to next word boundary.

shift + arrow left/right: select a character to the left/right.

ctrl + shift + arrow left/right: select to next word boundary.

There's a pretty popular macOS key bindings file that remaps shortcuts to be more in line with what you would find on a Windows machine particularly with respect to word boundaries and text editing, which is pretty much a must install on any new Mac for me.

except at some terminals, when ctrl+arrow doesn't work, or prints a weird character, so you try alt+arrow and it does work. then you're using alt+arrow for so long you go to another terminal, use it, and end up switching to another tty session, the same as you had learnt for ctrl+alt+F2. your brain pauses for 5 seconds, you try and get back with ctrl+alt+F1, which does nothing here. then you capsize bare metal and revert back to a VM within your childhood OS to emotionally distance yourself from the shapeshifting nightmare of linux key bindings, install the latest guest additions, accidentally press ctrl+alt+down at a loading screen out of underwhelmed boredom, now your screen within a screen is downside-up. you then short circuit your $300 keyboard with tears, before briefly dismissing reconsidering your life choices

Replace ctrl by alt and that's macOS hotkeys. Except there are a ton more which one can use (but of course doesn't have to use)

Of all the things to criticize macOS and Macs on, keyboard shortcuts are not it. They’re the gold standard of consistency and ergonomics as far as I’m concerned. I get not being used to them and having different muscle memory.

This. It is mostly a memory muscle issue people have to deal with.. and using your thumb - strongest digit for your primary modifier vs a pinky.. the weakest ought to just be common sense.

Nonsense. I don’t know what software you were using, but it must have been a badly ported from a different platform. The basic shortcuts have not changed much since the 1980’s. Moving a word forwards or backwards has always been option-left/option-right arrow. In fact, the default shell configuration in Terminal allows you to navigate the command line with option-left/right-arrow.

Ok, so I had to dig out an old blog post: https://techinorg.blogspot.com/2010/04/swithing-to-mac-one-y...

So it wasn't jumping between words it was home/end.

Definitely not rose tinted glasses. I regularly use an old SE/30 to write notes in Word 5 just as an escape from distractions when I'm trying to get thoughts down and organized.

Sounds older than what I worked on, one of the beloved (by Mac fans) 2009 Macbook Pros.

Mac SE/30 is from circa 1989.

Completely agree with this sentiment. I can't stand MacOS for this, and various other reasons. I'll never use it again as a personal OS.

Seems I am not alone.

I have recently started to use it for personal things though, but again just things that I can use all the time in the world for.

I tried installing a dev environment on it and it was instant frustration.

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