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Comment by eviks | Hacker News Reader

> took me maybe 15 years of using the terminal every single day to get used to using Ctrl+A to go to the beginning of the line (or Ctrl+E for the end).

And the curse of bad defaults strikes again (daily).

After the realization that this is a weird default you don't train yourself for 15 years, but change it to your comfortable/common keybinds!

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I wonder what terminal that is, because the Home and End keys, which I'm pretty sure are the expected alternatives, work fine in every terminal for me on Linux.

I have the same experience.

I feel like you're being willfully obtuse here. I can't remember the last time I used a laptop which had Home / End keys.

Edit: actually I do remember -- it was an HP ProBook from 2011.

I can't remember the last time I used a laptop without Home/End keys.

Among them are a Dell from 2002, an IBM from 2006, another Dell from 2018, and a Lenovo from 2019.

...and here's one from 2024 that still does: https://www.storagereview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Sto...

Almost every (Windows) laptop has them, although they do all use their own unique (IMHO often awkward) layout.

For the complaint to make any sense in the first place there needs to be an expected alternative way to go back to the beginning and end of a line. Otherwise it would be "it took me maybe 15 years to get used to being able to go to the beginning or end of a line in one keystroke". The two such options I'm aware of are Home/End (on macbooks I believe that is Fn+arrow keys) and Ctrl-a/Ctrl-e.

What alternative key combinations do you expect to work for the purpose?

I think I didn't communicate that well. What I saw was:

    jvns: I didn't know you could go to the beginning of the line
    you: But you could have just pressed the Home key

The obvious answer is: jvns doesn't have a Home key.

There are many keyboards without home and end keys.

I'd rather press left or right arrow keys 40 times than pollute my brain with yet another keystroke to remember.

If you were an Emacs user you would find this to be a good and useful default. ;)

Remaps Capslock to Ctrl and it will make a lot of sense. Other heavily used shortcuts are Alt+d, Alt+Backspace, and Alt+Left|Right.

Still wouldn't, why would you use your weakest finger in the bad sideways motion for such a frequent operation???

It's usually the weight of my whole hand. I touch type, but my hands are usually tilted to the exterior. So I hit keys like Enter, Capslock, Shift, with the side instead of the tip of my fingers. And I don't mind sliding my whole hands if I'm going to use it repeatedly.

Side vs tip doesn't come close to tipping the balance

And the last part is backwards - you don't need to use it repeatedly, there are much better alternatives, so you could just as well not mind not doing it

These defaults are not bad if you use Emacs :) Or if you use macOS that (gasp) supports the very same ^A and ^E shortcuts in all edit controls.

They are, you just remap them in emacs and Mac as well

There is no point in suffering for decades just because some bad defaults exist elsewhere

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