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Comment by dogma1138 | Hacker News Reader

Until you use a non English keyboard. Alt-F4 is perfectly acceptable OSX has its own share of stupid key bindings especially where the browser is concerned.

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The main thing that irks me on Macs is the non-standard behavior of the Home and End keys. I expect them to go the beginning or end of the line I'm typing, and in every other system they do, whereas in MacOS they usually scroll to the top or bottom of the entire page.

Basic emacs keybindings work in most MacOS text boxes. CTRL-A goes to the beginning of the line, CTRL-E the end, CTRL-P prior line, CTRL-F forward, CTRL-B backwards, CTRL-N next line. I think this was originally a NEXTSTEP thing.

http://unix-kb.cat-v.org/

As that page notes, C-a and C-e are not just Emacs bindings; and are even in Vi. However, the other bindings mentioned are Emacs bindings; and macOS textareas do support Emacs keybindings (on ctrl, not cmd), and that includes C-a and C-e.

I believe the comment about NeXTSTEP was not that the keybindings originated there, but that NeXTSTEP implemented Emacs keybindings in textareas, and that macOS inherited that (I don't know about the accuracy of that though).

Oh, and the page said "Rob Pike answers in 9fans: “I believe ^H ^W ^U date back at least to TENEX.”"; it seems odd to me that he didn't mention that 'H' with the control bit flipped is literally the ASCII "backspace" control character.

Yeah, the thing that irks me is when C-a and C-e don’t work. (Most things support it these days, but I’m afraid it’ll be less prevalent in the coming years as fewer people are familiar with emacs.)

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