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Kinto: Mac-style shortcut keys for Linux and Windows

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Re: Kinto: Mac-style shortcut keys for Linux and Windows

#121

Post by fishywang »

pmontra wrote: post #120
fishywang wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>One specific keyboard shortcut has a mouse-based workaround Except for that particular action (select some text on terminal then copy) you have to use mouse to do the "select" part anyways.

That's why I never connect a mouse on my laptops. I've got a touchpad that's part of the keyboard. I select text with it and paste with its middle button. I only buy laptops with three physical buttons precisely because of this user case. A mouse would slow me down. Where a mouse is really needed is in action games. A touchpad is too slow there.

Doesn't the word "mouse" include trackpads in most context?

Re: Kinto: Mac-style shortcut keys for Linux and Windows

#122

Post by 1_player »

1996 wrote: post #117
thomastjeffery wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually in Linux (specifically in Xorg) it's select to copy and middle click to paste; which uses a separate buffer from the C-c/C-v clipboard. Personally I find this method much more usable than the traditional windows-style clipboard. Either way, you want to generally avoid C-c for copy in terminals because it's already bound to the all important "send sigterm signal to foreground process". This is on a long list o…

> Either way, you want to generally avoid C-c for copy in terminals because it's already bound to the all important "send sigterm signal to foreground process". This is on a long list of ancient cruft that exists in terminal emulators and shells. stty intr ^X Then ctrl-c will no longer bother you, and your muscle memory will quickly adapt as X is very close to C

Muscle memory doesn't help with "not quite what I'm used to, but it's very close". It doesn't handle conditional statements.

Re: Kinto: Mac-style shortcut keys for Linux and Windows

#123

Post by fulafel »

rubyn00bie wrote: post #55

This is great, btw. Kinto is 100% a sanity saver. Please note the following rant is mostly tongue-in-cheek. 'cuz it turns out, I personally hate how Windows and Linux do things with `ctrl`. Coming from a Mac, my biggest and most consistent annoyance is that the `ctrl` key is fucking useless at best... One of the most common use cases for the `ctrl` key is COPYING shit and followed by PASTING shit and it DOES NOT WORK…

The ctrl-c for interrupt is a default of terminal, it can be changed with stty. Eg "stty intr ^g" will make the terminal interpret a ctrl-g character as a signal to generate the interrupt signal.

(And Linux the OS doesn't have any opinion on GUI terminal keybindings. You may be tempted to point your finger of blame towards X11 next, but X11 traditionally the text selection is mouse based with implicit copy on select - paste defaults to shift-insert in the bundled X11 terminal emulator. The shift-ctrl-c charade was created by gnome-terminal I think)

Re: Kinto: Mac-style shortcut keys for Linux and Windows

#124

Post by ideamotor »

beloch wrote: post #12

The difference between Mac and PC keyboards is a real usability problem. If you're used to PC's or Linux, moving to a Mac and dealing with their shortcuts is painful, and vice-versa. The worst is using a mixture of both Mac's and PC's on a daily basis. Moving back and forth between platforms daily means you either have to get used to hitting the wrong shortcuts or use a hack to swap keys around on one platform so you…

I switch very regularly and had difficulty until I begun to just swap out keyboards between macOS and Windows. That somehow ties my muscle memory for each OS much better. I pretty much have exclusive keyboards for different OS even if I use VMs on my laptop.

Plus, after much searching, there is not a good non-Apple keyboard for the Mac and the Apple keyboards aren't good for Windows. One example: the right side of of the left ⌘ key should be vertically flush with the right side of the X key. This makes it much more natural to reach for all those ⌘ shortcuts (particularly ⌘ + r and ⌘ + t, and for me I have many ⌥ hotkeys setup with BTT). On most Windows keyboards, Alt is left of Spacebar, and Alt's right side lands vertically on the middle of the X key, not on the right side.

Re: Kinto: Mac-style shortcut keys for Linux and Windows

#125

Post by lloeki »

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #34
dataflow wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What made you switch from Windows to Mac? Was it the Metro UI everyone hates? Because you can get rid of that in 5 minutes and forget it ever existed after that.

I switched from Windows to Apple around 2010, after using Windows 7 for a year, and away from Apple a year or two ago, after Mountain Lion. With Windows and Mac both, it wasn't any one thing in particular, just a "death by a thousand cuts", so to speak, of a general feeling of the platform changing shape without me having any say in it, without any bi-directional feedback, just changing at someone else's whim, and ha…

> Mac GNU

There’s no such thing as "Mac GNU", since the userland and outermost kernel interface is of BSD lignage.

Which does a double whammy on the "GNU/Linux" pedantry, since the Linux-based system described above has only a very limited part of it that are actual GNU projects, or even GPL licensed.

That is, unless I’m mistaken and parent uses a system without Xorg, and only lives with bash, glibc, make, GCC, coreutils, and emacs. GNU/Linux is quite an ascetic system these days.

Re: Kinto: Mac-style shortcut keys for Linux and Windows

#126

Post by kergonath »

beloch wrote: post #12

The difference between Mac and PC keyboards is a real usability problem. If you're used to PC's or Linux, moving to a Mac and dealing with their shortcuts is painful, and vice-versa. The worst is using a mixture of both Mac's and PC's on a daily basis. Moving back and forth between platforms daily means you either have to get used to hitting the wrong shortcuts or use a hack to swap keys around on one platform so you…

> The PC and Linux worlds are not going to adopt Mac keyboard layouts.

And that’s a damn shame, because they make much more sense.

> As the one oddball computer manufacturer that uses their own layout, perhaps it's time for Apple to offer PC keyboard layouts as an option on their machines out of consideration for people who have to use multiple platforms.

Lol no. I use Linux, Windows and macOS each about a third of the time (Linux for work, Windows because I have to, and macOS for fun and working from home), the last thing I would want is my Mac at home getting significantly worse just to reach the lowest common denominator. Besides, you can use any PC keyboard already if you really like the window key.

The use of control as the modifier key for keyboard shortcuts is an unfortunate historical accident, not the better way.

Re: Kinto: Mac-style shortcut keys for Linux and Windows

#127

Post by jibbit »

I have to use a Mac, a Linux, and a windows laptop. Three different keyboards. Then I have a couple of different external keyboards at the office, a couple at home, and a couple at my partners where I’m spending weekends. I basically have three modifier keys, A,B,C (that I don’t understand the rational behind - but thanks, I learnt a few things from this thread) that I have to try -in turn - whenever I want to use a shortcut (not exactly a shortcut any more). There isn’t a day goes by that I don’t want to burn it all down and start from scratch building a new keyboard/OS. Or run vim on the metal and use that as the OS, or switch to voice control, or mind control, or anything!

Re: Kinto: Mac-style shortcut keys for Linux and Windows

#128

Post by kergonath »

ideamotor wrote: post #124
beloch wrote: post #12

The difference between Mac and PC keyboards is a real usability problem. If you're used to PC's or Linux, moving to a Mac and dealing with their shortcuts is painful, and vice-versa. The worst is using a mixture of both Mac's and PC's on a daily basis. Moving back and forth between platforms daily means you either have to get used to hitting the wrong shortcuts or use a hack to swap keys around on one platform so you…

I switch very regularly and had difficulty until I begun to just swap out keyboards between macOS and Windows. That somehow ties my muscle memory for each OS much better. I pretty much have exclusive keyboards for different OS even if I use VMs on my laptop. Plus, after much searching, there is not a good non-Apple keyboard for the Mac and the Apple keyboards aren't good for Windows. One example: the right side of of…

> there is not a good non-Apple keyboard for the Mac

I have been very happy with my successive Matias keyboards over the years.

Re: Kinto: Mac-style shortcut keys for Linux and Windows

#129

Post by corytheboyd »

Does this do more than remap copy/paste keys? Nothing wrong with just doing that, but I was a bit confused from the leading examples.

Needless addition that nobody asked for: Having recently switched to Ubuntu from MacOS as my primary development environment, I very much felt the pain of losing many keyboard shortcuts I had grown accustomed to (amongst other subtle things, like the really good default PDF viewer in MacOS, and yeah yeah yeah I know there are Linux alternatives). I ended up installing a jetbrains marketplace plugin that as-best-as-possible mimics the MacOS bindings and then just re-learned the rest and.. it wasn't TOO bad, probably a week or so of feeling like a limb was missing.

Re: Kinto: Mac-style shortcut keys for Linux and Windows

#130

Post by alisonatwork »

glsdfgkjsklfj wrote: post #105

I will only respect this project if it completely breaks alt+tab on windows and linux to make it useless like OSX, where you cannot go to a specific terminal window. ha! sarcasm aside, I wish there was something that was the exact opposite. I tried to map cltr+c/v on OSX but it doesn't work on some applications, like firefox. And using Switch application that fixes alt+tab to all windows (not programs) for some reaso…

Hear, hear. Alt-Tab is abysmal on Mac. I have no idea why people keep going on about Ctrl-C in the terminal, as if we haven't had terminals on both Windows and UNIX that copy-on-select for 20+ years. Broken Alt-Tab is far bigger impediment to my workflow.

I guess you have tried Karabiner-Elements[0] to help remap the keyboard? It's infuriating that it doesn't work properly in all the apps. Especially the browsers all seem to map their own keyboard shortcuts or hijack keys. If you use IntelliJ then that's a whole nother level of pain to try to map properly. I don't think I have ever succeeded in making arrow key movement inside text fields work consistently across all applications on a Mac.

Another app I think is a must is the BetterSnapTool[1]. It's the only app I've found that does a reasonable job of snapping like Windows. There are dozens of other ones, but none of them work quite properly. BetterSnapTool doesn't either, for example you can't snap a window from a half to a quarter and back up to a half again, then restore it back to the original size before you snapped. But you can snap it to half, full and original size. Most of the other tools on Mac don't remember the original size.

I also like uBar[2] to get rid of the dock and replace it with a more useful task bar. It's not as good as the one on Windows 10, but if you're forced to use a Mac for work then pretty much anything helps.

[0] https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/

[1] https://www.folivora.ai/bettersnaptool/

[2] https://brawersoftware.com/products/ubar

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