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Comment by nickcox | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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)

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.

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