Keyboard differences between Windows and Macs (unsung.aresluna.org)

GNOME:

    gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-key-theme-name 'Emacs'

or GTK:

     ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini
     ~/.config/gtk-4.0/settings.ini


    [Settings]
    gtk-key-theme-name = Emacs

I have it enabled but it can be very confusing: depending on whether you're in a text field or not, in say a browser, ^W will mean delete word or close tab. And sure enough closing a tab will sometimes but not always focus the URL box of the previous tab.

There used to be an obscure internal GTK setting to properly separate control plane from command plane like on (then named) Mac OS X but IIRC it's long gone / hardcoded to only GTK on macOS.

EDIT: Found it, GTK up to 3 had proper <Primary> vs <Control>. In what I would consider to be a fatal regression, GTK 4 just aliases <Control> and <Primary>, leaving the apps to do the work.

https://gaphor.org/2022/12/10/gtk4-macos-keybindings/

Ctrl+a to carriage return the cursor seems work universally everywhere on a Mac. It even works on Microsoft products, incredible coming from the company that poorly reinvents everything and completely disrespects the default behaviors.

I always find this curious, is readline implemented at the hardware level or something? There’s just no effing way that was a priority ticket on Microsoft Teams given all the obnoxious weirdness of their chat text field.

And bizarrely, ctrl+k, ctrl+w, and ctrl+e are more seldom. Maybe 50-50 chance for those. But trusty ctrl+a is always there.

Another surprise was discovering that Ctrl-J adds a newline in Claude Code. I'm fairly certain this is a feature of the environment, not CC, but it works everywhere I've tried it. KDE Konsole on Debian.

       Oct   Dec   Hex   Char                        Oct   Dec   Hex   Char
       ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
       000   0     00    NUL '\0' (null character)   100   64    40    @
       001   1     01    SOH (start of heading)      101   65    41    A
       002   2     02    STX (start of text)         102   66    42    B
       003   3     03    ETX (end of text)           103   67    43    C
       004   4     04    EOT (end of transmission)   104   68    44    D
       005   5     05    ENQ (enquiry)               105   69    45    E
       006   6     06    ACK (acknowledge)           106   70    46    F
       007   7     07    BEL '\a' (bell)             107   71    47    G
       010   8     08    BS  '\b' (backspace)        110   72    48    H
       011   9     09    HT  '\t' (horizontal tab)   111   73    49    I
       012   10    0A    LF  '\n' (new line)         112   74    4A    J
       013   11    0B    VT  '\v' (vertical tab)     113   75    4B    K
       014   12    0C    FF  '\f' (form feed)        114   76    4C    L
       015   13    0D    CR  '\r' (carriage ret)     115   77    4D    M

macOS supports emacs-like bindings natively: Ctrl-A/Ctrl-E for line start/end, Ctrl-K to kill, Ctrl-Y to yank, Ctrl-F/Ctrl-B for forward/back, etc.

They are defined in /System/Library/Frameworks/AppKit.framework/Resources/StandardKeyBinding.dict. You can create ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict to augment or override those.

Anything built on AppKit that uses the standard text system (NSTextView, NSTextField, and the field editors that back them) supports those bindings “for free”.

For non-native apps, Karabiner Elements⁽¹⁾ is the answer, using a config like this⁽²⁾.

⁽¹⁾ https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/

⁽²⁾ https://github.com/pdelfino/karabiner-config

> because linux never picks the correct method

Because linux is not an operating system. A specific operating system will have some specific behaviour.

I remember that a lot of older folks had trouble understanding when to use a single click and when a double click. Clicking twice rapidly was also difficult for them, and they would consistently jerk the mouse and drag things around. Having every part of the interface in earlier windows draggable and reactive made this even more frustrating, since for them things would just disappear from the desktop.

"which was perfectly correct for someone not being used to computers."

I disagree.

Even someone with no experience with computers understands, generally speaking, that the mouse is tracking the surface of the desk somehow. I have had this conversation many times (or did, back in the 1990s when mice were more novel for most people). Nobody picked it up.

The ones who do in these anecdotes are, IMO, examples of the sort of people who absolutely shut their brains off in protest when asked to work with new tech. I have been blessed in that I have only very, very rarely been asked to work with or even know such people.

During my M.Tech in Comp. Sci, I was requested to volunteer to be a lab assistant in a diploma course in programming in C for non-technical people. A Ph.D. in Philosophy was complaining that his program was not compiling. He wrote "exist(0)" instead of "exit(0)". I found this so interesting. Existentialism was on his mind, I guess. The program clearly exits by not existing any more? Can't argue with that!

I corrected him and went on my rounds. I remember that a bank manager was the best of the batch. By the time I circled back to my philosophy friend, he quietly changed "exit()" back to "exist()" and the program was not compiling again! This anecdote stayed in my mind.

There were plenty of stories back in the day about assistants being asked to copy a floppy.

Some used a photocopier.

The tabs in question covered modern Firedox, xfce4-notes-plugin, and I think gedit. It was the concept of tabs, not the appearance. None of them looked that much like the tab on a manilla file folder.

Maybe the GP is friends with George RR Martin.

This is perhaps an indirect confirmation that The Winds of Winter is back on track.

Well, not really DOS, but company where I did migration (15+ years ago) from 4GL and AIX to Linux and Aubit 4GL did exactly that. They all used HyperTerminal (after me, putty) to connect and start all sorts of apps, think, SQL AND UI at the same time, terminal apps, with keyboard shortcuts that MUST be exactly the same, otherwise you would have mutiny.

They are sold a few years ago, new owner just needs a good (and huge) location in the city, if they continued, nothing would change for people working there. They saw Windows as something just for minesweeper and solitaire, nothing else.

> Who the heck has been using DOS (!?) until "pretty recently"? On what machine?

Not "DOS" in the classical sense, but a good corporate travel agent will probably spend the majority of their day in Amadeus or Sabre on a terminal emulator app - and be much, MUCH faster than clicking around in web portals.

A school teacher at a small charter school, teaching various levels of math and a few foreign languages. This person was pretty technically proficient - they used a linux to access the web, but it was set up to boot a browser in to full-screen kiosk mode, and they pretty much just searched webpages and printed things out sometimes, no email really.

The DOS was DRDOS 7.22, and it was very elaborately set up -- it boots from a CDROM or USB flash disk as a live disk. On the disk is every assignment, homework, or test for any of the various courses he taught, carefully organized. They are in WordPerfect 5.1 with a few graphics in another program, and a graphing ( as in X-Y cartesian plots ) program also, all ancient freeware DOS. The three programs come up instantly on boot in different terminate-and-stay-resident screens, that you switch to with a control-alt combo, very like switching terminals in text mode linux.

This meant he could take a CDROM to school, pop it in the horibly slow and ad-laden windows computer some government program had given the school for free, boot, disconnect the printer from the network to the constarnation of other teachers and plug in a USB cable, and print his assignments, and never bring back viruses. The students when they learned of this situation would search out old viruses on the web and try to infect everything.

But using windows and mac was pretty limited to a little bit of browsing, and occasionally going to a dedicated machine with the right program already set up, to enter grades and time sheets and etc.

I'm still using DOS to control a galvo-steered LASER animation system from 30 years ago. 133MHz Pentium, non-MMX, 16MB RAM, 16MB Voodoo3.

They were familar with a mouse from DOS based drawing and diagram programs. Most of those did not have keyboard and mouse input active at once, you were using the mouse, or you were in a different mode to enter text. Some of them had one pointer, so you could be typing, bump the mouse, and put characters in the wrong place.

Focus follows mouse was a thing in the X11 era too. We are still in the X11 era, and it is still a thing. (-: Until X11 window managers like IceWM vanish entirely, it will remain a thing.

* https://ice-wm.org/manual/#focus-models

It's definitely a matter of what you're familiar with. As a Linux user I'm able to use the "Compose Character" key (I map the right-hand Ctrl key to it) and then use that to write diacritics just as I used to in my university computer lab in the '90s on DEC VT220 terminals!

It's quite a good system: you press compose-character and then two letters to be combined. E.g. CC/o/" gives ö and CC/a/o gives å and so on. If you don't know the exact combination, you can usually guess within one or two attempts e.g. just now trying to get ç I guessed CC/c/s (š) and then CC/c/c (č) before getting it right with CC/c/,

Apropos of Swedish keyboards, though, when a Mac is inflicted on me, the horrible contortions necessary to get all the usual programming bracket symbols ({[]}) are infuriating. They're a lot less annoying on a Swedish PC keyboard.

I distinctly remember using Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator way back to replicate Mac way of entering some typographically correct punctuation on top of Polish layout. You could make your own custom layout as well.

However, when I still used Windows 11, I remember there being a variant of US keyboard layout built into the system that included Mac-like way of entering international diacritics. I no longer have access to a machine with Windows, but a quick Google search suggests United States – International might be what you're looking for.

I always use this, maybe it'll help you: https://andrewdunning.ca/Mac-Keyboard-Layouts-for-Windows/

Yea, having trained my muscle memory for at least 10 years on macs, my daily driver desktop is finally a modern Linux distro, and I'm having the most trouble with un-learning the ⌘ shortcuts. On Linux, sometimes "copy/paste" is CTRL-C/V, sometimes it's SHIFT-CTRL-C/V (meaning I need to position my pinky AND ring finger like I'm playing guitar or something). In terminals it's never CTRL-C/V, and once in a while there is an application where it's something bonkers. I kind of miss the universal ⌘ shortcuts that the entire macOS system and all 3rd party apps followed.

That's not a developer friendly keyboard. For menu years I'm using Dejan Vesic's keyboard on PC where programming symbols are used as primary and you get ex-yu šć latin chars via AltGr. Works great if you're 90% coding, and occassionaly write something in native language. If you have to type more, you switch the keyboard to "non-programming" layout. I tried to bring this mapping to Mac, but with limited success - I could map AltGr to right "option" key, so not to the closest button to the space ("Command"). When I switch Mac/PC there's some time to readjust muscle memory.

I tried to keep the keys mostly the same but the one I could never get used to was command + c/v/f/etc. It's just too awkward a combo for fingers. Using pinky for control on the left was much better ergonomics. So I swapped control and command keys.

Finder has its whole set of keyboard navigation shortcuts, like command + up arrow to go to parent, command + down arrow to open, ⌘3 for column view, ⌘⇧D for desktop, ⌘⇧H for home, ⌘⇧G for "go to"… I am very fond of the Finder’s navigation and as a long-time Mac user it still feels pretty clunky to try and get around on Windows. Both Windows and Mac are getting worse but it seems like Microsoft is making it worse faster, with OneDrive.

A lot of the Finder shortcuts work in the save / open dialogs in apps, although they broke some of the ergonomics of those dialogs years back.

They're written underneath the symbols on most (all?) Mac keyboards. At the very least, it's that way on my current MacBook, and my previous. I think they're also written on the magic keyboard I have as well.

Feel free to share yours, I’m very interested!

This is exactly the kind of software you could consider vibe coding. I think there are also free apps like Karabiner-Elements, though maybe not as polished.

karabiner-elements works very well to remap keys in macos even in very complex ways if you want. (multimodal ways held does something with other key presses but pressed by itself would emit a different code like esc or capslock)

It also has the benefit of (mostly) separating OS wide keyboard shortcuts from terminal commands. Copying text is always “CMD-c”, and not “usually CTRL-c, except in a terminal where it’s actually CTRL-Shift-c, because otherwise that would interfere with terminal control characters”

> Ctrl asks you to give up a pinky, a home key finger, to execute common chords - far more critical than a thumb

Am I particularly odd for only using my thumb for space?

I use left-pinky to press either the left-ctrl or left-command. This naturally places left-ring on top of shift for ctrl+shift combos on Windows but I usually use right-shift on command+shift commands with right-pinky. Any keys I press on the right side of the keyboard during this cord are done normally since my right hand remains on the home row the entire time, on the left side I'll typically then use left-index to press the other key.

If I use left-thumb for left-command instead then I can only figure a way that involves moving that hand completely away from the home row and for shift combos I then can't reach most keys and need to move right-hand off the home position. If I use right-thumb for right command I end up with the same in the inverse. I guess one could pick the opposite command based on the keys you needed to press after but it seems like an extra thing to remember + still results in more overall movement.

It's funny how I must have typed at least many 10s of millions of keys by now and never really thought about how I type key combos.

How does your pinky naturally rest on Control? Your pinky should be resting on A. Your thumb rests on Space, which makes shifting it to hit Command easy.

It hurts _all the time_ for me.

I've used a Windows PC my entire life. 35 years of PC.

I use my MBP M2 Pro when I travel, and for about 6 weeks every summer, and it's like pouring lemon juice into a paper cut the entire time.

Specifically, my concerns are around this exact matter: I have such muscle memory attached to, say, slamming my pinky across L-Ctrl+L-Shift+left arrow in order to quickly select just the previous word from the cursor.

This is something I do... I don't know, at least once a paragraph, as I very very quickly type and then realize I've introduced some basic typo that I need to nuke the previous word to address.

Doing this on Mac keyboards is Shift + Option + Left Arrow and... it's hell. It's absolute hell. Mashing that extreme corner shortcut with my pinkie is so baked in that there's just... no reasonable way for me to reprogram my brain to do that on a Mac.

Similarly, I have a stroke every time I try to mentally remap what things use control and what uses command. And while I could potentially remap the fn key on an MBP keyboard, I tend to use my Logitech K800 on both systems, so instead try to remap control to ALSO be command to basically get me as close to muscle memory as possible for things that need the command + shift. Since control is relatively rarely used, I think I just remapped it to caps lock. Though boy does that screw me in tmux.

Either way, when I'm typing extremely fast, being able to reliably navigate the caret and jumping around words, whole lines, etc. is just something I simply cannot get anywhere close to on a Mac and I die a tiny death every time I try.

It depends on the context. If you're a PC user and you got a Mac at your new job, there are likely more important things to learn.

This is HN, so you probably spent a fair amount of time in different computing environments.

Beginners have to learn every system from scratch, in the limited time they spend on the computer.

CUA is a union of Mac like mnemonic command keys on Ctrl plus another set (from IBM/Motif perhaps) that use shift+insert,delete etc.

Alt+F4 through Alt+F9 are for Window Menu operations, like minimize, max. etc. Some besides Alt+F4:Close still work on older window managers, I remember SGI supported all of them.

Newer ones tend to hide or even disable the whole menu! Even Windows as it is further lobotomized.

> I love that on macOS all in-app shortcuts are consistently Command+Something, like Q for Quit, W to close a window

Yeah consistency is great, similarly cmd+t closes a tab, wait cmd+w closes a tab not a window. and cmd+w in vlc does not close vlc, cmd+w in finder does close the window.

This is so hilariously wrong.

Apple commands are not always Command+Something. Go ahead, try to reopen the last closed tab on anything you're using, with the keyboard. Whooops, you pressed three keys. Also try to take a partial screen shot or record the screen. Hey, buddy, what the heck? Why did you press 4 and 5? What do 4 and 5 even mean?

Ctrl-W will close your window on Windows and end the program if it’s the only window open.

It's [Alt]+[F4] because before being translated to a GUI setting where [Alt] modifiers denoted things that were the same across all applications, or at least 'system key' events, it was actually plain [F4] to 'save and exit'. This was notably the case in some PC-DOS text editors.

Common User Access (CUA) in 1987 came from the world of IBM mainframes to IBM-involved microcomputer operating systems like PC-DOS and OS/2, and was the idea that there would be a common set of function keys across all 'panels' in Systems Application Architecture (SAA) applications.

Fun fact: CUA didn't originally define [F4] with its current meaning, and it was actually [F3] to exit, after [F1] for help and [F2] for toggling between two sets of function key bindings. But notice how [F5] was refresh all along.

* https://web.archive.org/web/20001117223900/http://publib.bou...

* https://web.archive.org/web/20001102070751/http://publib.bou...

Just a note - first time I see this and you just made my day, as Home/End behaviour on Mac was driving me crazy since I switched 7 YEARS AGO

And c-n / c-p - with those you barely ever need arrow keys

Mac equivalents to Windows Home and End are Cmd-ArrowUp and Cmd-ArrowDown. Fn-Left and Fn-Right are Mac-flavored Home/End, which don't move the text cursor, but scroll the text container, keeping cursor in its original place (although there's no distinction when viewing documents, e.g. in a web browser).

  Fn-Left = scroll to top
  Fn-Right = scroll to bottom
  Fn-Up = scroll page up
  Fn-Down = scroll page down

  ⌘-Up = cursor to top
  ⌘-Down = cursor to bottom
  ⌘-Left = cursor to start of line
  ⌘-Right = cursor to end of line

How did they configure this, do you know?

I know, and the Return key both returns the carriage and feeds the paper forward a line on teletypes. Hence the symbol ⏎, indicating "down and to the left" (for LTR languages.)

Thumb + index?

Why would you use a pinky? Thumb to the left to Command, index finger down to C.

It should be a standard that the different OS's support switching between methods. If you like the OSX way, then you should be able to use it. If I don't like it, then I shouldn't have to use it.

At least on Linux you have some more choices, maybe not specifically the finer details of the keyboard stuff, but there are a bunch of things that OSX does that I really dislike. On Linux, I could change them. OSX, so far, most have been either not changeable, or appear to my newbie eyes unchangeable.

Yes! Super frustrating that Apple didn't map Alt->Command and Win->Option so the keys would be in the same place on laptop and external keyboards.

I do this as well as swap command/option on the built in keyboards. It works great for me switching between my own computers/OSes but always a second of re-calibration when I touch someone else's Macbook.

They still work on iOS when you have a keyboard plugged in, so someone in Cupertino has my back!

I agree about fn, when I say 4 I mean shift, alt, ctrl, cmd.

Alt+F4 in Windows has always been "close window", not close app. It is even shown on the traditional "application icon" menu on each window, that many new apps are unfortunately doing away with.