Hacker News Reader

Comment by atombender | Hacker News Reader

All Mac apps use the Command (⌘) key for copy/paste.

I've never encountered an app that uses Ctrl. A developer would really have to go out of their way to accomplish this in their app, since the copy/paste menus are provided by Cocoa; the keyboard shortcuts are essentially built into the OS.

View on HN

Actually I was misremembering. I was thinking of the Terminal app and having to use Ctrl+A/E to go to beginning/end of line. But jumping words uses Alt+arrow keys. And copy/paste is Cmd+C/V. I find the mixing of the modifier keys really unintuitive as a Mac noob.

Unless they're X11 apps, those use whatever they feel like.

Of course — the same can be said for terminal programs or Windows apps run via virtualization. Those are not "Mac apps".

But at this point the situation is the same as on linux. I've never encountered anything on linux that didn't use ctrl-c for copy other than terminal apps.

The situation on macOS is that you can copy text from Terminal the same way you copy text from Safari. You can edit text in iTunes the same way you edit text in your shell.

Sure. So each platform has different exceptions, but my point was they both have exceptions. The terminal is an exception on linux, but not on macOS. Other apps are apparently exceptions on MacOS, but those same ones probably aren't exceptions on Linux. The exact apps are different but the overall situation is the same.

Using a terminal on Linux is common. Using X11 on macOS is not.

so what is a "Mac app"?

A GUI program that uses native APIs to display windows and menus.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com