[chrsig]

forget coherent, i want consistent.

using a mac for work and a windows machine for personal use messes with me. add in editors having inconsistent emacs keybindings, and some macos apps respecting some subset of emacs keybindings while others don't...and then a kinesis advantage to make some of the solutions non-viable

[comfypotato]

As a long time Windows user who switched to a Mac at work at one point, I was pleasantly surprised by the extent to which I was able to make the Mac conform to my muscle memory. If I remember correctly, I basically swapped the software mapping command and control. On top of this, I had to finagle with a system shortcut or two. In the end, everything just worked as if it was a Windows machine.

Concerning Emacs, I've found that a combination of QMK and AHK allow me to make everything work more or less like Emacs. Ultimately I think I might be lucky to have a decent memory for this sort of thing, but I've found that I can use the keyboard for everything everywhere.

[nicbou]

Keyboard shortcut consistency was one of the first pleasant surprises of switching to MacOS.

[R0b0t1]

The first step of consistency is determining and agreeing on what you want the computer to do. I don't see this happening, and it kind of removes the point of having multiple DEs, etc, for experimentation. Though perhaps after investigating in this direction, one might understand how users want to interact with the system key bindings, if at all, and be able to break down user interaction into digestible chunks.

Everyone has heard (or... most people) about a lot of the clever Apple shortcuts, but they are intensely not discoverable. People still need to go out of their way to learn them. It's just it's Apple, so no one cares.

[orthoxerox]

Even on Windows alone some shortcuts are terribly inconsistent.

Redo (Ctrl-Y or Ctrl-Shift-Z)

Replace (Ctrl-H, Ctrl-R or Ctrl-Shift-F)

Save As (F12 or Ctrl-Alt-S)

"Move current paragraph up" is inconsistent even between Microsoft's own programs: Alt-Shift-Up in Word, Alt-Up in VS Code and Visual Studio. Notepad++ adds to the pain with Ctrl-Shift-Up.

Ctrl-F doesn't open a Find dialog box in Outlook, I could go on.

[pwg]

> Ctrl-F doesn't open a Find dialog box in Outlook

For this, in Outlook, the explanation is (per Raymond Chen): Bill Gates

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20140715-00/?p=50...

[PTOB]

I've gone back and forth on this. It's an email client whose shortcut for Forward has been Ctrl-F for decades. After much soul-searching, I've come terms with Ctrl-E for sEarch.

[BitwiseFool]

>"Ctrl-F doesn't open a Find dialog box in Outlook, I could go on."

You would think, at some point, they would add this in as an optional feature. I wonder how many people submit this as a piece of feedback.

[denimnerd42]

One reason I’ve developed such a dependency on mousing and not short cuts. Now it’s just windows and macos but before it was windows, macos, unity, and gnome 3. Using the mouse is sane. 2-4 sets of shortcuts is not.

[copperx]

Well ... I switch between Qwerty and Dvorak. 2x the pain! That's one thing that I didn't foresee when learning Dvorak.

To use a shortcut, I need to know :

1) What keyboard layout am I using?

2) Am I using a Kinesis or standard keyboard?

3) What OS am I using?

4) What app I'm using?

Don't do it, kids. Now I'm so invested in Dvorak that I can't go back. It's an irreversible change.

It's suprising, but muscle memory somehow makes all of this work (most of the time). Sometimes I screw up horribly.

[chrsig]

for a while i was exclusively using gnome3...without getting into a gnome2 vs gnome3 debate (gnome has been my default since 1.4, I found the gnome2 introduction just as jarring as the gnome3 introduction) --

Using soley gnome3, I feel like I was able to reach peak productivity. I was able to easily switch between tasks by allowing them all to be fullscreen, and just scrolling through the desktops with barely moving my thumbs. Great emacs keybinding support. Especially in emacs.

I've been fighting tooth and nail with macos, because they use both option & command with their keybindings. There's no winning no matter how I rebind.

Windows I mostly don't try. jetbrains has a good enough emacs keybinding that doesn't seem to get clobbered by the OS.

[hydrolox]

once you use a program enough,imo, you'll learn useful shortcuts even if they're incoherent. I hate editing text or programming with a mouse after using vim for a while. Same with many other programs. + you can always rebind but it's a lot of effort and stuck on your computer

[yjftsjthsd-h]

Some of it is https://xkcd.com/927/ all over. EMACS is so old that it couldn't use an existing standard because it predates them. Then CUA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access) tried to set a standard but not everyone used it and it fell out of favor, and MacOS did its own thing, and we eventually got to a place where nobody has enough pull to set a standard so it's just a question of what convention(s) a given program decides to support (or not).

Edit: Which is the big reason why I believe that every program should allow users to customize shortcuts completely and ideally ship with presets that do their best to conform to every standard/convention possible ("do you want to preload CUA, EMACS, or MacOS convention shortcuts?").

[actuallyalys]

For macOS-Windows consistency, you can try kinto.sh, although the AutoHotkey-based implementation is not always reliable in my experience.