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Comment by alberth | Hacker News Reader

IBM CUA

I’ve always wondered how different Unix/Linux would be today if decades ago a Common User Access (standardized menu system like FILE | EDIT | etc) had been defined for TUI apps (like how it was for Windows & Mac OS).

Imagine VI & EMacs having the same key bindings due to standards.

https://sqlite.org/hctree/doc/hctree/doc/hctree/index.html#s...

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vi and emacs are prehistoric. Folks now are ok with / and \ and maybe some can deal with : as a file separator.

But in the precambrian era you needed to know about ^ to edit a specific version of a file, because diffs were tracked.

They're both wonderful and amazing and can handle anything, because they had to handle everything when filesystems were like a brand new invention and nobody really knew what was good or bad, so they threw everything in.

Tough to get standards before standards exist.

Power of Vi is that its keybindings are way more ergonomical compared to IBM CUA. If you're a touch typist.

It doesn't make sense to change Vi/Vim/NeoVim keybindings because they're so convenient, composable and easy to remember.

That is only the case if you think you have to press Ctrl using your pinky. You can use the side if your palm instead. Then CUA suddenly becomes very ergonomic. Try it. I've done this for over 15 years now across a plethora of different keyboards and also survived several years of Emacs unharmed thanks to it.

I just tried this on my laptop and it is the most uncomfortable thing I've done on a keyboard.

It's probably due to my shoddy description. You put your fingers into the touch typing homerow. Shift your left hand enough for the edge of your palm to be above the ctrl key. It might also be the base joint of your pinky, depending on the size of your hand. Now press that side down enough to activate the ctrl key while keeping your fingers on the homerow. It's like having an eleventh finger to control the keyboard.

I feel like i'll get carpal tunnel if i do this five times lol, your hands might be a lot smaller than mine

How do you do that without hitting Shift? It seems needlessly finicky compared to just properly holding the key down with my pinky. I'd say the best way to avoid RSI while using key combinations is to follow proper procedure and hit the opposite modifier, e.g. Left Control + S (Right Control for Qwerty typists).

I used to do approximately this, from maybe the mid-90s to 2015-ish, but finally that keyboard died (RIP dear friend) and I find that it doesn't work properly on any keyboard I've found since.

Not quite the side of my palm, but the joint where my pinky meets my palm. My hands are relatively large, dunno if that's relevant.

I should put more work into buying a keyboard that it does work on, I think using my finger for Ctrl might be starting to cause RSIs in my middle-aged hands.

I guess I'll also add that for me it's a bigger deal when gaming than when using CUA. That Ctrl button is the one true place to put crouch, dangit.

Most of the time the joint that you describe works for me. Sometimes I use the side of my palm. It has worked for me on pretty much any keyboard so far, regardless of the height of the caps or the travel. On those with an fn-key I have had to remap the key somehow, sometimes in the BIOS sometimes using software. The exception is a smallish bluetooth keyboard I bought for a tablet. It's fn-key is hard to remap inside mobile OSes.

So very much this. Around the end of the 1980s / start of the 1990s, all the big DOS apps switched their weird proprietary UIs out for CUA ones. Sometimes with an option to go back, but not often. Sometimes with some of the old UI as well, but mostly, big-bang.

And everything was better, the users adjusted, nobody ever looked back and we were all better off.

Sadly the memo never reached the Unix world, and those terrible 1970s are now enshrined as holy writ.

Emacs has a mode called cua-mode with keybindings thats more simillar to ones from other modern gui programms like browser.

It's a tiny tweak that gives something like 1% of the functionality.

The real, useful, working CUA mode for Emacs is here:

https://ergoemacs.github.io/

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