YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Tapping modifiers keys is something you might want to do.

I know many people on smaller keyboards map a single Control tap as ESC.

The only thing special about windows, is that the OS gets to own the Win key completely, which is something not too crazy and I sort of like the idea of ensuring their global shortcuts are always available.

That's how it is by default but doesn't approximately everyone, when they first plug a non-Mac external keyboard into their Mac, immediately go to System Settings -> Keyboard -> Modifier keys and switch Command with Option?

Otherwise it would be really confusing when you switch from your external keyboard to the laptop keyboard.

Logitech in particular do this. Their keyboards adapt to the OS so the keys are in the right place, not sure if this needs their drivers or not though.

Most newer keyboards I know have a toggle so the CMD and ALT switch in software. I had to switch from Mac to Win and Linux so often that I simply kept my CMD key where Super or Win is located and got used to it. Still sometimes weird when I use an actual Mac keyboard.

Caps Lock remapped to control. By using a keyboard where I can remap keys at the firmware level whenever possible, and in the OS when not

Ctrl-C doing different things come from different os/software lineages

Of (home,end,pgup,pgdown,delete,backspace) the mac has just backspace. And they have just a single control key and such. Clearly the mac keyboard is designed by people that have no idea how to type. There's no "standard windows keyboard" anymore, but even the worst is still worlds better than whatever apple puts out.

Yeah this drives me crazy too.

As a sibling comment notes, Caps Lock as Control helps a lot but it's still not as nice as Command-based shortcuts, both in hand positioning and in terms of shortcut overlap.

I entirely agree. At $NEWJOB, I had a Linux laptop for a bit while a Mac was on backorder.

Not being able to cut/paste easily because every tool used the Control key for something different, especially in the terminal, was infuriating.

Having the command key handle these kinds of GUI-focused interactions, and Control for most of the terminal-centric and text manipulation (Ctrl-A/E for beginning/end of line, from Emacs) makes the system great to work with.

I didn't mind anything else about my foray into Linux as a desktop OS. If we could get a Linux GUI distro that all it did was match the Mac command key paradigm, I think it would make a lot of people happy.

Nope, it is a crying shame the early Linux/Unix desktop environments copied the Windows/IBM CUA shortcuts and now we have to fight every app and every different method there is for setting keyboard shortcuts to fix it. The Ctrl key was already claimed for use in the terminal for signals and line navigation.

Toshy can help but it's still not a perfect fix.

> First, it sits near your pinky instead of your thumb

It's not bad if you have a keyboard (e.g. topre) with control in the caps-lock position (or remap it, which I usually do).

And I also agree that the Lisa/Mac-style command-[zxcv] works really well (particularly if you use a mouse with your right hand.)

MacOS has no problem with both control-c (break) and command-c (copy) - why isn't this common in Linux as well (at least for keyboards with a command or windows key, which seems to be many, many keyboards.)