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Comment by Nursie | Hacker News Reader

There's certainly been a learning curve for me recently, when switching to a Mac for my main work computer. Muscle memory for Ctrl-C, Ctrl-X and Ctrl-V are very strong and I find it highly annoying there's no easy way to make this work as it does on Linux and Windows.

Also plugging in an external, standard (non-Mac) UK keyboard leaves you with weird mappings all over the place, and Home and End don't do what they do on every other OS, but appear instead to be largely useless.

I appreciate Mac OS is it's own thing, but it does make switching that much harder and more frustrating.

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There's a reason they don't use Ctrl-C etc for copy/paste - because in the terminal, as I'm sure you know, Ctrl-C sends a SIGINT signal. In OS X you can use a consistent command for copy and paste across the whole operating system, including the terminal.

That's not a good enough reason to break my muscle-memory, IMHO, even if it is consistent. I prize consistency across platforms more than within.

I think the point is that Microsoft 'broke' your muscle-memory by assigning an already-in-use shortcut.

Exactly. IIRC the command key and shortcuts were added on the Apple IIe. It's not a recent addition and not something that 'broke' anyone's muscle memory. If they'd changed it to ctrl-c to cater for windows users, that would've broken historical Mac muscle memory.

They could support it being an easy config option. Instead you can swap the keys (which breaks the key combos you might use in a VM, AFAICT) or you can mess around with KeyBindings, which only apply to some applications and not others.

Not having an option for it at this point in time seems like little more than bloody mindedness. And regardless of any of this, it makes it harder to switch comfortably to Mac OS than pretty much any other OS, and I use a lot of different OS's to get my job done.

I will concede that they could have made it reconfigurable (though you can indeed reconfigure using third party software like KeyRemap4MacBook). I was just giving a bit of historical context as to why this was the case - the IIe being a terminal-based machine. Apple are quite stubborn when it comes to accommodating people switching from other platforms, they tend to believe that their ways are the best and most usable, and that that alone will sell people on their platform. For me, that turned out to be true - having used Windows/Linux most of my life and making the full-time switch about 7 years ago, I almost always prefer the 'Apple way' these days.

No, the point is that I had to change when moving to Mac when both Windows and Linux support the Ctrl way.

That particular shortcut is not in use 99% of the time in the modern era. Arguing that the MAC UI is somehow centred around console applications seems a little churlish. Plus it's far easier to context switch on the single application level (am I in a terminal? Ctrl-C isn't copy) than it is on the platform level (which OS is this application, which looks identical on every platform, currently running on? Oh wait, is this one in a VM?).

Regardless of who may have been 'right' 20 years ago, Mac OS sticks out and makes life difficult now. It's also non-optimal in terms of either requiring a weirdly cramped hand position or two hands, but that's secondary.

I had this problem and solved it like so:

    * OS X: caps lock -> command
    * iTerm: left command (the rebound capslock) -> control

This means in iTerm I need to use the right command key for command shortcuts, but it gives me a convenient control for terminal use. The end result is the same thing as binding caps lock to control on a Linux machine.

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