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Comment by breuleux | Hacker News Reader

> Ctrl + C to cancel a command in terminal but Cmd + C to copy text in terminal. Ok, then why Cmd + T to open a new tab in terminal instead of ctrl?

Because Ctrl+T swaps the two characters around the cursor, which is what it should do in a terminal (and in Mac OS, it does this in all text boxes in all applications). Mac OS is actually remarkably consistent about all of this. In Linux, Ctrl+A goes to the beginning of the line in a terminal, but it selects all text in other applications. In Mac, Ctrl+A goes to the beginning of the line, everywhere.

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That's because macOS (thanks to its NeXT origins) incorporates emacs keybindings throughout most text fields by default.

This is a weird but so so killer feature to me. Our lives are constantly about text editing in one way or another, having all the usual ways of navigating text available across the entire OS is the best feature of all.

Ditto, having consistent and useful text-editing keybindings in ~all fields (that use the native toolkit, at least) was something I didn't know I needed until I experienced it. Anything that's (even) less consistent than the real-world experience of that on MacOS feels... wrong, now.

I use this feature frequently too, but the downside is that it makes non-native textboxes stick out like sore thumbs because they don't implement it.

In fact, this is common to a lot of little poweruser features on macOS, and I think is a big driver of distaste towards non-native apps by long-time Mac users.

> In Mac, Ctrl+A goes to the beginning of the line

huh TIL! and Ctrl+E goes to the end. amazing thanks

  C-t swaps adjacent characters
  C-b/f move backward/forward a character
  C-p/n move up/down a line
  C-k kills (cuts) to the end of the line
  C-y yanks (pastes) what was killed (but does not use the same clipboard as Cmd-c)
  C-h deletes backwards one character
  C-d deletes forward one character

Probably more, but that about covers the ones I use.

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