[layer8]

It’s a tragedy that OSs haven’t evolved to provide explicit support for that. Imagine that every application would expose a catalog of its internal actions, and that there would be an OS-level configuration facility to define your custom keyboard mappings, and possibly also macros, for the application actions. There’s no reason that every application should need to reinvent the wheel here. You could also export your configuration and import it on a different account, or possibly sync it across devices.

Similarly, the OS could provide a facility to define custom toolbars based on available actions, that could automatically be attached to the respective application windows. Basically, an OS-managed version of the toolbars that used to be ubiquitous in Windows applications.

[javajosh]

Indeed. Although it seems like AppleScript wanted to do something like that, to get apps to expose their nouns and verbs, which is a really great idea. Perhaps if Apple'd sweetened the deal with "universal shortcuts" more app devs would have bothered to expose this catalog. Who knows! And heaven knows Apple's scraping the bottom of the barrel of innovative OS features, so maybe this will happen at some point...and/or they'll wait for AI-improved OS that can provide the catalogue without dev involvement.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

I guess the way it played out is that it's implemented in toolkits. So Debian, per se, doesn't know about shortcuts, but QT does. AIUI MacOS wins here by having a standard API at least for menus. Linux distros lose out by just not doing any integration. (Well, almost any; they sometimes try. I say this with love.)

[qu4z-2]

I will never not sing the praises of KDE3.5 (although of course stuff like shortcuts and use of KIO mostly only works in apps built on KDE libraries).