[coutego]

I'm quite sure it's just a question of what you are used to. It is for me, anyway.

My first PC (~year 2000) came with Windows but I wanted to use some software that only existed for Unix at the time and I was used to work in Unix anyway, so I heard about Linux and installed it. Great, I got an OS I was used to and the software I needed for my project.

When finally I had to use Windows for work a couple of years later it took time to adapt and, even to this day, I just find it easier to use Linux. It's just a metter of what you are used to.

Last year I bought a MacBook, because of the M1, and I can't get used to the "weirdness" of MacOS, specially the keyboard and the window management. Every other machine I use (Linux, Windows or ChromeOS) uses the same keybindings but in MacOS the same software I use everywhere else (e.g. Chrome) has been forced to change the standard keybindings to something else and and it's even not configurable. Programs just don't implement stuff as C-c to copy and C-v to paste. Programs link that functionality to S-c and S-v, instead. WTF? This means there is no remapping of the keyboard that can fix this, since the software itself is broken.

For me, this makes the machine pretty unusable. I'm a keyboard guy and quite fast at it. But when I'm in MacOS I waste a lot of time finding the right keybindings even for switching Windows. Example: S-w to close a tab but C-TAB to switch tabs %~(

[kitsunesoba]

> Last year I bought a MacBook, because of the M1, and I can't get used to the "weirdness" of MacOS, specially the keyboard and the window management.

For what it's worth, long time Mac users feel that *nix desktops and Windows have the same kind of "weirdness" you describe here. The majority of modern macOS conventions can be traced back to the original 1985 Mac or the 5-10 years following its introduction.

I started on macOS but can switch between control schemes pretty fluidly these days, thanks to having regularly used all three major OSes for several years. That said I wish there were at least one Linux DE that cloned macOS conventions as faithfully as the rest have cloned Windows conventions (with the exception of GNOME, which is more like what you'd get if you turned iPadOS into a desktop OS with Windows keyboard shortcuts).

[jemmyw]

There is a tool that makes Linux act as if it has Mac keybindings. https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto I've been using it, with some custom config, and it's made life a lot easier as I use a Mac and Linux laptop at the same time.

[rbreaves]

Thanks for the mention, I have tried hard to be faithful to mac conventions and to be honest it was both a harder and easier problem to tackle, several months.. maybe a year or more before it got to be really solid but it sorta requires one to think about it in layers so you're not really killing yourself to remap every little thing individually lol.

[tambourine_man]

The command key is one of the great accidental geniuses of macOS (née Mac OS X).

It used to be just a Mac thing, but when the OS became Unix, you suddenly had a GUI key (command) and a command line key (control). Which is great for mental split and flexibility.

You can have Ctrl-C to cancel and Cmd-C to copy on the same Terminal app.

And you get to use both command/option/shift + arrow keys along with readline/Emacs shortcuts on any native text input. So sweet.

[rsynnott]

I wonder if this response is because common Linux desktop environments are _so_ derivative of Windows these days. I started using MacOS around 2004 (the G4 iBook was _amazing_ in its day; if you wanted a Unix-y laptop with decent battery life, working power management and wifi, and vaguely affordable, it was the only game in town), having previously been using Linux since about 2001 and Windows before that. At that time, Linux desktop environments generally didn't use the same conventions as Windows anyway, so moving to MacOS wasn't that jarring.

[dagmx]

You can swap cmd and ctrl in the keyboard prefs to give you more Windows/Linux like key commands.

Personally I think CMD is more ergonomic but muscle memory trumps all I suppose

[coutego]

Unfortunately, that doesn't solve the problem.

The issue is not which labels keys have printed on them. I don't look at my keyboards and I always remap keys for them to be in the positions I like. That's fine and works in MacOS.

The issue is that the same application (Chrome, for example, but happens with most of them) uses the same key combinations in Windows, Linux, Chrome OS and Android (I use DeX from time to time on my S7 Tab) to do something but then decides to do something different in MacOS _without giving the user the possibility to fix it_.

Chrome example: C-w closes a tab and C-TAB changes tab in the first four OSs. In MacOS, though, it's S-w and C-TAB, respectively. There is no remapping which can fix this because the correspondence between keymappings on a given modifier key is not a bijection. The only possibility would be that each program gave the user the option to "use standard keymappings". But very few do, AFAIK. Emacs is the only one that works the same on all systems. But I also need a browser ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

I'm not saying that MacOS convention is worse or better than the standard. In fact, I personally like the idea of having the CTRL-like functionality on my thumbs, rather than my pinkies, and I could migrate to this layout on all computers I use (via key remaping, in the same way that I already have remapped on all computers I use the ESC key on the place that normally CAPS is). I'm just saying that using MacOS makes me slower, both when using MacOS itself _and_ when using the other OSs, since suddenly I have to conciously decide which key combo to use. Normally this was something that just happened subconciously and didn't interrupt my flow.

[brailsafe]

I use an MS sculpt keyboard and use Karabiner to swap the keys.

[dagmx]

You can swap them in the system preferences without needing extra software. At least for the modifier keys

[sofixa]

That doesn't work for key combinations such as Cmd+Tab (which only switches between applications, but not between windows of the same application) and Cmd+` (which switches between windows of the same application), you have to change them too, and some of them flat out aren't configurable out of the box, requiring third party software.

[ask_b123]

Is S = command?

What I'm seeing is: close a tab -> cmd+w; copy something -> cmd+c; switch tab -> cmd+option+left/right arrow, switch window -> cmd + `

[umanwizard]

Yes, coutego is using Emacs notation for key chords, in which S-whatever means what macOS users would call cmd+whatever, Windows users would call win+whatever, etc. "S" stands for "Super" key.

[sofixa]

Same thing with keyboard mapping, it really bothers me. However I've found that using a keylogger to remap (Karabiner) works decently with very few exceptions (iTerm).