Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by nitrogen 1621 days ago
MacOS has a very powerful built-in shortcut changing system that appears to date all the way back to NextStep based on some of the names of prefs and plists to change.

But, every Electron app and productivity website hard-codes the old Mac shortcuts based on naive platform detection instead of using native OS inputs, so the muscle memory conflict is even worse.

To anyone who just "doesn't get" this complaint, which is a lot of people I have met, it's like riding a bike your whole life to the point of being able to do downhill mountain terrain races, and then switching to a bike with the steering reversed, while wearing image distorting glasses. Except it's worse, because it feels more like someone chopped off your fingers and reattached them in random places.

It is literally nauseating, because when you are so deeply familiar with a complex tool it becomes an extension of your proprioception, and the tool misbehaving feels like you've been poisoned.

2 comments

I agree with nitrogen. And why would I want the OS level copy/paste to conflict with my terminal commands? Zamalek I think you are not realizing how much worse of a UX that would be when the terminal wants to use Ctrl & the GUI apps can use "snowflake" as you put it lol. Separates out the duties perfectly well.

Also to free up Win key combos more you can either disable it entirely via regedit, which I do not recommend - or explicitly disable certain letters individually by putting them into a string in regedit. This then frees it up for better remapping under any remapper, including mine kinto.sh.

``` Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced] "DisabledHotkeys"="B"

``` restart explorer.

I did know about this, but I can't get any terminal to respect the modifier key switch (including Apple's own). The modifier key confusion is now following me into Windows and Linux. I deeply hate MacOS.