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by xnhbx 2878 days ago
Talking about keyboard shortcuts consistency on MacOS, how do you think about Home/End/PageUp/PageDown (or Cmd/Fn + Left/Right/Up/Down), and further on, combined with Ctrl/Shift? The behavior varies dramatically across different apps. It's a nightmare comparing to that on Windows/Linux.
1 comments

For the most part, the only variance comes from non-native (usually electron) apps. Keyboard navigation in text fields is perfectly consistent between native Cocoa apps because there it’s implemented at the toolkit level so devs get it for “free”. If some cross platform app doesn’t follow suite it’s because their developers took the easy way out and ignored platform conventions.
Not just non-native apps. Try Sublime Text vs. TextEdit.app, iTerm2 vs. Terminal.app, ForkLift vs. Finder.app. The functionality of Home/End/PageUp/PageDown is much more than just navigation inside text fields. Unlike text fields navigation, OS generally cannot force application behavior in these cases. Developers on Windows/Linux all follow the same conventions while Mac developers take various directions whatsoever.

And why excluding non-native apps? They count for a large portion of app ecosystem nowadays and they don't have the same problem on Windows/Linux.

My bad, I thought you were speaking only in the context of text fields. I don’t really use those shortcuts outside of text manipulation.

As for why exclude non native apps... it’s a personal preference thing, and I don’t enjoy using them. I avoid them whenever I can and will opt for a native alternative where possible, even if it means shelling out some cash.

In fact, I’d say that’s one of my gripes with desktop Linux — for some things, an electron app is the only option and nobody cares to develop a GTK+ or Qt alternative. I’m a big believer in use of the local UI toolkit, regardless of platform.