I like how Apple introduced the CMD key, with copy/paste linked to it in the terminal, leaving CTRL to work as intended. Even outside the terminal basic emacs key binding work as intended, such as c-k c-u etc
Apple introduced copy and paste in 1983 using the command key. Microsoft later copied the idea using the control key because PCs lacked a command key [1].
X had super, meta, hyper keys before the PC's stunted set of modifiers became a standard [2]. Microsoft and the PC are rarely the origins of things, mainly because CP/M, DOS and later Windows were poor, amateurish, and incomplete copies of other systems.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut,_copy,_and_paste
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_key_(keyboard_button)
There's a lot of things about Apple I dislike but it's clear Microsoft's overloading of Ctrl for GUI shortcuts was a move made with complete disregard for terminal users, & one that's resulted in decades of pain for anyone regularly switching between GUI & terminal contexts, & I have to give it to Apple that Cmd was clearly designed to respect, retain & augment optimal terminal use.
I got to appreciate it only after I had to use macOS at work.
Somehow I got used to Ctrl workarounds in terminal emulators (just add shift). But the lack of accelerators bugs me immensely.
I find them a little too dependent on individual app developers word choices to have any kind of consistency across apps I use, plus I tend not to use menus for anything other than infrequent settings changes. Given that they haven't seemed substantially different to macos displaying annotations for bound shortcuts within the menus.
(admittedly I use mac in work & my personal computers at home have all been Linux since my Windows 2003 workstation died, so my knowledge of modern windows apps & their attached accelerators is rusty & I'm probably biased here)
And they are not just about menus: in any modal window I can do Alt+O for Ok. And this paradigm allows discoverability, I don't need to memorize shortcuts, I just hold Alt and look for underscored letters – that's how GUI should be IMO.
It's not perfect, and if I were designing UI from scratch, I'd made this feature modal instead of allocating entire physical key for that (like they do hints in vim-like browsers).
As someone who switches between macOS and Linux every day, the change of control-key from CTRL to CMD is hella annoying. I am always pressing the wrong combo on macOS.