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Comment by vijucat | Hacker News Reader

I guess Elementary had to copy the Cmd+spacebar shortcut to mimic the Mac OS experience (Spotlight), but on that count, Windows' just-press-Win-and-start-typing experience is much better. It's just one key less, but opening up a program is used ALL the time, and eliminating that key press makes a huge difference, IMHO. Not sure when they introduced it in Windows, but that was a good one.

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> just-press-Win-and-start-typing experience is much better.

Despite the non—stop bickering, this has been the killer feature of Gnome 3 since it's inception. Most applications can be launched just by hitting win, the first one or two letters, and enter. The whole DE is streamlined for efficient keyboard driven operation and makes multitasking and launching arbitrary programs lightning fast. It doesn't have as many customization options that some other DEs have, but I highly recommend trying it out.

Mashing two buttons that are literally side by side vs. pressing one button is not really a huge usability boost.

Having a key like Option which allows you to easily type accented characters and other things quickly is a big deal.

As someone who works on both a Windows + Mac environment day to day...I find myself accidentally hitting the option key expecting the spotlight a lot.

I don't know if others feel this, but moving between IntelliJ on MacOS to Windows and back is a nightmare. I stick to the defaults as much as I can and it's still memorization hell.

For occasional accented characters, the Compose key is pretty good.

€ is Compose, C, =.

Æ is Compose, A, E.

Ë is Compose, ", E.

  > Having a key like Option which allows you to easily type
  > accented characters and other things quickly is a big deal.

On ⁎nix (ie X11 or Wayland) the functional equivalent of Option is ISO_Level3_Shift, aka AltGraph or AltGr.

If you use one of the common Linux desktop environments, there should be something in the desktop settings that allows you to make one or both PC Alt keys act as ISO_Level3_Shift, as well as a keyboard layout variant with Mac-like mappings. In KDE (which I think is the current best choice for Mac refugees because you can rebind shortcuts to use Command), look in System Settings under Input Devices → Keyboard → Layouts → 3rd Level Shortcuts.

If you don't use one of the common Linux desktop environments, you want something along these lines as part of your startup:

  setxkbmap 'us(mac)+level3(alt_switch)' -print | xkbcomp - $DISPLAY

> Mashing two buttons that are literally side by side vs. pressing one button is not really a huge usability boost.

I have a feeling you're saying that while being a Mac user 99% of the time, and using Windows 10 1% of the time. Correct me if you actually used Windows 10 for a serious length of time.

IMHO, once you get used to the convenience of Windows 10, you can't go back. Not having installers, clunkiness of Spotlight, the outdated sheer unfriendliness of Finder...I found the one year I used a Macbook Air with OS X Mavericks an unpleasant experience.

The accents: I would have no idea. Even in the corner case that Microsoft has not thought about Europe at all, I bet you can find a Windows utility (most probably free) that would replicate exactly what you need.

Edit: "The AltGr key functionally resembles the Option key", apparently: http://superuser.com/questions/814843/mac-style-option-key-f...

I go with Winodws+R and there is a software called Everything http://everything2.com/.

Windows + Space is for switching input language or keyboard layout. But other alternatives are win+Q or win+S. It just works fine.

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