Hacker News Reader

Comment by lucideer | Hacker News Reader

I use Toshy along with an Apple keyboard to work around Linux distros' unfortunate Windowsiness here but I really really wish someone would release a fully fledged distro or DE put together with Apple keyboards in mind.

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.

View on HN

OTOH, Microsoft's introduction of "menu accelerators" (Alt+*) is an incredible productivity booster (which luckily most Linux graphical toolkits have adopted).

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've always found menu accelerators odd.

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)

The last windows I used was XP. But accelerators do work in Linux.

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).

Also lovely! I was going to look for somthing like Toshy - https://github.com/RedBearAK/toshy

Reply on news.ycombinator.com