[tpmoney]

A large part of this I think is that other than MacOS, GUI conventions aren’t heavily implemented by the OS and easy to opt into. And because no other OS landed on “meta key for GUI shortcuts” so there are a lot more conflicts (e.g. ctrl-c).

The Application Framework defaults which underly most native macOS application build a lot of common keyboard controls in. Use the default menu bar classes with the default basic commands, and Command O, N, Q, X, C,V and probably others come for free, you just implement the code that you need to for those functions. Use a standard text field and you automatically get Command/Option/Fn Left, Right, Up, Down for navigation. It’s more notabke when a macOS application doesn’t follow convention (e.g. InteliJ uses Shift-Opt up/down to move lines rather than expand the selection by paragraph) than when one does.

Windows does decently well on this front, but ctrl as a default modifier can hurt terminal based app usage and there are a number of UI frameworks even within the OS that appear to get different defaults.

And in the Linux world, I think the only way you could do this would be for someone to design (and a distro to standardize on and port apps to) a full on application framework. The window managers don’t want to be in the business of dictating the behavior of stuff in windows. The GUI toolkits don’t want to be in the business of defining os wide defaults and the DEs and distros don’t want to be in the business of if porting or dictating UI frameworks. And realistically there’s no one “on high” that could make the sort of dictation that for example “hence forth copy and paste will be Meta-C and Meta-V”