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Comment by leobg | Hacker News Reader

Which shortcuts? You have a link to a list? I only know Cmd-left/right to skip words. But anything more fancy?

if you are using left/right arrow keys, that is not emacs. Control with F, B, A, E, K, etc are the ones I'm talking about.

Ok. Interesting. Where on macOS can I use these for navigating inside text? If I’m inside Textmate, for instance, typing F just… well, types an F. And it would seem to me that that’s the case anywhere on macOS where there is a cursor, no?

anywhere you type text -- right now, while I'm typing this, or in a browser address bar, command line, anywhere the keyboard is functional and doing something with text

You have to use Control with it, of course. F by itself is... F.

if you swap caps lock with Control as most developers do, then it's a nice, simple, ergonomic addition.

Pretty much all text fields in macos have emacs keybindings. I guess you haven't used macos for more than a week yet?

Wrong. I’m using it for over 15 years now! And I’ve never ever even just heard about this. And keyboard shortcuts are the first thing I look for in any app. Hence my surprise

Wrong on your part. Macos had these keybindings since forever. They are not just per app but everywhere.

> I’m using it for over 15 years now! And I’ve never ever even just heard about this.

Wow, that is embarrassing.

Edit: For example

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co...

I’m not embarrassed at all. Else I wouldn’t have dared to ask. And would never learn anything new.

Sorry, I meant embarrassing for apple. It tells you something about their UX if features like these can be missed for 15 years. I included a link in the previous post. Apps using cocoa inherit the emacs keybindings automatically and hence they are widespread on mac.

Side note: emacs keybindings are less widespread on Linux, because you don't have such a component and GNU readline has a too strong license. So ironically emacs makes a strong case for using a proprietary OS.

Ha. Thanks for clarifying. I had read your comment the other way around and thought you were trying to be rude.

I guess if someone knows emacs then maybe they’ll just try those key bindings and discover that they work. I never worked with emacs, but I would have learned the shortcuts had I known they existed.

It’s what I’m going to do now.

> You have a link to a list?

`man readline`

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