Comment by WWLink | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WWLink | Hacker News Reader

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I don't know what you're talking about. Historically, mac programs were designed with way more, and way better hotkeys than Windows apps. It's just that people got used to alt and arrow keys to dig around menus. Macs have a whole proper 3rd modifier key. Up until Windows 10, the "Windows Key" was a damn joke that wasted a spot lol.

Plus I can do things like ctrl+a/ctrl+e pretty much anywhere to go beginning of line/end of line (except microsoft apps). I can use ctrl+c in the terminal like it was meant to be, since copy is mapped to cmd+c.

I could go on probably, but seriously, that was one of my favorite things jumping from Windows 2000 to Mac OS X lol.

I honestly couldn't stand using Windows for any serious kinda work until 10 added WSL and improved git support.

Then again, I learned how to program on bsd machines and spent most of my teenage times using linux and OS X. I still don't really grok writing code or using dev toolchains on Windows. It's such a foreign OS. Everything about it feels backwards and upside down. It's like every other OS is a car with a wheel, shifter and two/three pedals. And then Microsoft came along and made a car with 2 joysticks and a butt controller.

Admittedly, MacOS is feeling more and more like that these days. They keep breaking shit. I tried to figure out how to accept/decline incoming phone call notifications (on a mac) and there isn't a hotkey for it. lol. I'm still pondering how I'd do that, because I have a stream deck here and I'd really like to set it up on my mom's computer lol.

Home/End keys work in DOS/Windows to go to beginning/end of line.

Hold down CTRL key as well and you should go to beginning/end of document. Hold down SHIFT key and you'll select from the current cursor location to the cursor destination.

Windows has Shift, CTRL, ALT keys. That's three modifier keys.

The Windows key has typically never been used for an application-level shortcut key. I only know of OS-wide uses of the Windows key.

I didn't even know until the prior poster ctrl-a and ctrl-e worked for mac apps. I guess someone added emacs binding in OS X at some point? I always learned the mac keyboard commands as:

Arrow Left/Right/Up/Down -> Move by character Option + Left/Right -> Move by word Option + Up/Down -> Move by paragraph Cmd + Left/Right -> Move to beginning/end of line Cmd + Up/Down -> Move to beginning/end of text field Shift + any of the above highlights in that direction

Page up/page down (on laptops Fn+up/down) -> Scroll up down by page (notably this doesn't move the cursor though, so you could scroll up to read something and then start typing to return to where you were) Home/End (on laptops Fn+left/right) -> Scroll to beginning/end of text field/document, with the same non-movement of the cursor Shift + any of the above also highlights, which does move the cursor

I was thinking the other day as I was diving into finally trying to learn vim that this might be why I've never found whether an app had emacs or vim keybindings to be a particularly important feature. That sort of text field navigation has been available in any app using native UI elements since the classic mac OS days.

Basic CUA bindings are good but I hope you didn’t stop learning Vim at jumping to the beginning/end of the line. Vim bindings do way more than that.

I have physical discomfort editing serious text in a browser, and I know about Ctrl+arrow to move by word, etc. I do miss things like jumping by sentence, jumping by paragraph, jumping to the opening/closing paren/brace, etc.

No didn't stop there, but in reality so far I've found most of the other ones are more task specific, and a lot of them were already provided by the IDEs or software, whether or not it had vim bindings. Obviously the benefit of vim bindings is being able to take that short cut with you between IDEs and apps, but they're also functions I use a lot less, so re-learning them when I switch apps hasn't been too terrible.

> And then Microsoft came along and made a car with 2 joysticks and a butt controller.

Dude, yep.

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