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Comment by synergy20 | Hacker News Reader

my problem with macos is not Unix certification but its keyboard,the odd CMD key messed up with my other ten non Mac keyboards

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I love CMD because it’s part of the copy/paste shortcut but not used for any terminal control codes. So there’s no confusion about whether you’re going to accidentally SIGTERM something in the terminal by trying to copy text.

I really really wish I could have this behavior on Linux… but alas, every app under the sun chooses its own copy/paste shortcut and they all use ctrl+C/V by convention so you can’t configure it globally without rewriting every app (ok maybe you could narrow it down to a few GUI libraries like gtk/qt/etc but it’s still a huge undertaking.)

I’d settle for “ctrl-c is copy if text is selected, SIGTERM otherwise” logic, which I think Windows’s console uses, but none of the Linux terminals I’ve tried support that. I’m left with ctrl-shift-C for copy, which leaks into my muscle memory, then I accidentally use that combo in the web browser too and it opens developer tools or something. So annoying.

Copy on selection is ubiquitous in all terminal apps. Shift+insert can be a reliable "paste" shortcut in most places.

I can’t stand X11-style copy-on-select/middle-click-paste, and disable that everywhere if that’s what you’re referring to. I habitually highlight text as I read it and hate it when it blows away my existing copy buffer. I want explicit copying, I just don’t want it to collide with SIGTERM.

Shift+ins is CUA, an actual standard. Which makes far more sense than parroting Microsoft’s decision to use CTRL as a modifier, aping Mac OSs keyboard shortcuts in Windows 3.1.

TIL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access

That’s fine for paste, but copy is the real problem. Also, shift and insert are very very far apart from each other and are not one-handable if you’re holding the mouse with the other hand.

Copy is Ctrl+Ins, cut is Shift+Del. Looking at my ANSI keyboard, all are achievable with one hand. Though, when these were designed, GUI’s on IBM based machines weren’t really a thing and two-handed keyboard shortcuts were common-place.

With a right handed mouse it’s hard to do Ctrl+Ins with my left hand. But it’s possible, I’ll admit. It’s just pretty suboptimal given how ergonomic Cmd+C is on a Mac keyboard (thumb on Cmd is way easier to reach for than pinky on ctrl, and reaching for ctrl+Ins is harder than either.)

Yeah, mice weren’t really a thing on the early IBM AT’s and clones when CUA was being developed. Mice were around and the GUI was very rudimentary (Windows 2.0), certainly when compared to System 4 and 5. In an ideal world, the Meta key, like those found on Sun keyboard, would have been brought over to AT keyboards to cover this.

I think it’s what you’re used to. I’m used to the Mac keyboard (since 1994) and I much prefer the command key for keyboard shortcuts. I can use my thumb all day but pressing control with my pinkie starts to hurt really quickly!

I need to find a guide on how to get the Mac keyboard experience on Linux. I agree that it’s objectively better.

I agree. I really like the ALT shortcuts on Haiku, and I remap my external keyboard on macOS so command is mapped to ALT rather than Super.

You can’t, basically. The copy key isn’t configurable for example, you’d need to rewrite the apps from source to achieve this. Some dynamically link to shared library UI toolkits that you could patch, others implement it themselves… it’d be a never-ending game of finding new broken apps and fixing them one by one (and that’s for open source apps, forget closed source ones.)

You could map Cmd to Ctrl but that only fixes copy/paste, but now it will send a SIGTERM to the terminal on Cmd-C now, which means that’s still a pain.

You could write some custom keyboard driver that intelligently maps the command keys to the right keys the app expects, dynamically based on some rules, but that sounds horribly brittle and likely unworkable.

Press Ctrl with a side of your palm, I've been doing that for years after a brief stint with emacs, no problems with the finger.

Also, on decent keyboards (not necessarily expensive) you can remap the keys anyway.

It’s not really an issue for me because I use a Mac. Having said that, I did remap the caps lock key to control which helps a lot. I usually press it with my ring finger.

I’ve used MacOS with an old IBM model M for 20 years… I map the caps lock key to CMD, as I dislike and never use caps lock.

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