[salehenrahman]

I might be wrong, but I think it has something to do with applications themselves explicitly looking for key combinations that involve the ctrl key.

So no matter how much Pantheon (elementary OS' desktop environment) and elementary OS' default applications use the meta key for copying and pasting and other functions, applications themselves would have explicitly be updated to listen for meta key presses.

But yes, I agree, I prefer Cmd+C/Cmd+V for copying/pasting, just that no matter how much I complain, and how much the elementary OS team could nod in agreement with us, it would take a major shift in momentum on all application vendors to prepare an entirely separate build, specifically intended to match Pantheon's idioms (favouring meta key instead of the ctrl key).

[wyager]

> it would take a major shift in momentum on all application vendors

This is probably why people like OS X. Apple can and does pull this off.

[kps]

Before the Linux CADETs took over with goal of cloning Windows, X11 programs routinely had configurable key bindings; poke around in /etc/X11/app-defaults (or your system's equivalent) for a few stragglers. Unix workstation keyboards typically had some form of Meta key (e.g. Sun's diamond keys) because they could think a quarter step ahead and realize that screwing up established uses of Control (i.e. ASCII) was a bad idea.

I think Qt / KDE is probably the best hope today. Since Qt got ported to OS X, there's an internal flag to use the GUI key for shortcuts instead of Control. If this flag were user-configurable it would solve a large part of the problem; perhaps the latest MacBook ‘Pro’ will generate enough refugees to make it happen. In the interim, KDE apps at least have individually configurable key bindings.