I have been helping someone who has little experience with Windows or Mac, but used DOS for years ( until pretty recently ) and I've set them up with a simple Debian Linux running XFCE4 as the desktop. I've found that I have to teach them and also document a lot of basic computer idioms -- Control-C / X / A / V to copy, cut, select all, paste; but also more basic things, like the fact there are two pointers on the screen -- one for the mouse and one for the keyboard -- if you slide the mouse pointer to a specific point and press a keyboard key, the new key will not appear where the arrow is, it will appear where the text cursor is.

A big one was tabs. I had to get a couple of manilla folders and show them the actual tabs, and hold it up next to the browser with several tabs, and suddenly it snapped with them what the interface was trying to represent.

Control-A will select all of a web page, unless you are in the text entry box of a form, then it selects just the things in that text entry box.

I started writing this up in a little manual, it got to a dozen pages fast, and I haven't put very much in it.

If anyone knows of a place where some portion of all of this is written down, post a link !

and Macs offer ⌘ Command, ⌥ Option, ⌃ Control, and ⇧ Shift

This is traumatizing for me. I tried to switch to a mac for home use and failed because of keyboard handling. Using Polish diacritics (made with right alt) wasn't obvious at first. I was able to switch keyboard settings to mimic Linux/Windows, but it's just not there. Control and Command confusion haunts me. I dropped the platform because of this and know a few people who stayed on iphones, but also dropped Macs because of keyboard.

I once tried to "find myself" on linkedin search bar on someone else's Mac. I though "I got this, I'm a mac user now!" and managed to close the browser tab and open some random programs...

I admire people who jump between those platforms. Even more for languages that don't have standardized alphabet mappings, like Bulgarian (it seems they don't have consensus there).

If you've ever made the jump from PC to Mac (or vice versa) at work or home, you're painfully aware that there are very real costs of switching platforms in terms of lost knowledge and productivity. In addition to flushing years of accumulated knowledge down the toilet — goodbye Outlook-Teams-OneDrive-SharePoint-Excel-Word-PowerPoint-VBA, hello GMail-Workspace-GDrive-Sheets-Docs-Slides — there's also the matter of a thousand UI and other "paper cuts" to contend with ("Why are you looking for a 'prt sc' key," condescendingly replies a Mac aficionado in response to a question from a former Windows user, "when Shift+Command+3 is so intuitive?").

Technically DOS could have had "backspace" (delete the character BEFORE the cursor), "delete" (delete the character on/under the cursor), and "forward delete" (delete the next character AFTER the cursor).

Dual booting between a MacOS and Linux is a painful process of manual keyboard and shorcut overrides to get the linux side somewhat to the (better) mac way of doing this.

Not even mentioning the general well thought out and more logical key-combinations.

The strangest key for the switch was return for file rename… I now miss it on every other system that hasn't mapped it like this.

What Windows calls ⏎ Enter, Mac calls ⏎ Return.

I'm not an Apple person at all, but this is one of the hills I die on. The "Enter" key is for entering data, submitting a field, etc. The "Return" key is for returning the carriage, i.e. starting a new line. Importantly, those two are different functions! The only keys that exist twice on the keyboard are modifier keys (Ctrl, Shift, sometimes Super and Alt). The Return or Enter keys do not need to exist twice. Clearly these are meant to be two different functions, because they are two different keys on the keyboard.

To my wife's annoyance, I teach my children the correct names for these keys.

On a Mac, in simple input fields, ↑ and ↓ jumps to the beginning and end [...] Windows doesn’t have this convention

IIRC it worked for me on Windows (and Linux :-) as well!

I do prefer ⌘←→ as it’s more consistent. Also, ⌥←→ jumps one word back/forward on Mac, the Windows equivalient being ⌃←→.

On Windows, [refresh is] typically F5, although some browsers now support Ctrl+R, too

Have always supported as far as I can remember :) F5 works on Mac in Firefox (and I think Chromium), but not in Safari.

On both platforms, Fn+↑↓ does PgUp/ PgDn, and Fn+←→ does Home/End.

This will vary a lot depending on the manufacturer. ThinkPad T420 and other models from that era use those for media keys (which makes sense, they do have physical Home/End/PgUp/Dn keys).

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Finally, a suggestion to fellow Linux users: try Mac keybindings, it’s amazing (especially if you’re e.g. running Asahi on a Macbook). Not all apps will be happy about this, but at least the KDE ones will generally follow the keybindings you set in the system settings.

The "Start" or Windows key is the same as the "Command" key

"Alt" is the same key as "Option"

This is how every keyboard I've ever used has worked. This is usually how they work when you plug a PC keyboard into a Mac or vice-versa.

A small group of vocal users love these.

That's me! readline everywhere by default is fantastic and should be immediately copied by every Linux DE!

I subsequently have to set my Mac keyboard layout to PC to fix backticks and remove that key that is never used, and rely on my touch typing. It does also mean that no one will ever try to type on my laptop.

One note:

Access to extra characters

For German keyboard layouts, there exists „Erweiterte Tastaturbelegung 1“ standardised in DIN 2137-01:2023-08. It's available in Windows 11 (since 24H2) and also in Debian Linux for example. It lets you enter all characters from European alphabets plus some nice extra ones. <https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/E1_(Tastaturbelegung)> has the details.

What Windows calls ⏎ Enter, Mac calls ⏎ Return. However, Macs also have an ⌤ Enter, although only on a numeric keypad

Just looked down on my windows keyboard and yes, the return key (the one above the right shift key) says "enter". That did not use to be the case. The return key used to say return and the tall key next to 3 and the numpad used to be the only enter key.

When did that change in PC land? I remember reading nerdy articles about the difference between return and enter.

I've been looking for a good Karabiner setup that makes things work like base Ubuntu (gnome shell shortcuts). Haven't found one yet. Anyone know of a good one?

Especially one that fixes ctrl-arrow keys so they go word by word, and ctrl-shift-home/end so it only selects the 1 line instead off going all the way to the top or bottom.

Thanks!

Also, the original post is going to be a huge help for a lot of people. So if the author happens to read this, thanks!

Control specifically is just a terrible modifier key for common things like edit commands. First, it sits near your pinky instead of your thumb, making chording it with Z, X, C, V, etc., really difficult.

But then... who decided that ctrl-c should be used for both copy and abort??? That's diabolical levels of messed up. In a terminal app ctrl-c aborts, so you need to use shift-ctrl-c to copy, and now you have two shortcuts for the same operation you need to remember based on context, except that in a web-based terminal in Chrome shift-ctrl-c opens "Inspect Element Mode" and now you have no way to copy!

Am I the only one who finds this astoundingly frustrating?

What Windows calls ⏎ Enter, Mac calls ⏎ Return. However, Macs also have an ⌤ Enter, although only on a numeric keypad (previously, it was even there on laptops! [1]). On keyboards without the physical Enter key, you can simulate it via Fn+Return.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_G3#/media/File:Apple...

I have spent literally several minutes scanning this keyboard for a physical Enter (as opposed to Return) and have no idea what the author is talking about.

Does anyone else have problem scrolling diagonally on a page that's a bit zoomed in(like on HN, you zoom in a little to read the threads)? It just doesn't move smoothly and instead does a staircase shape traversal.

This used to occur on all browsers before upgrading to Tahoe, now it's mostly fixed but still persists on Safari.

For reference: https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1hh5yjo/diagonal_tra...

Windows still supports Shift+Delete for cut, Ctrl+Insert for copy, and Shift+Insert for paste. I am not sure how many people use these.

Shift inset is handy when ssh-ing intobabtemoyr machine with Python windows.

Windows still supports Shift+Delete for cut, Ctrl+Insert for copy, and Shift+Insert for paste. I am not sure how many people use these.

So I grew up using DOS and these were pretty universal across edit/qbasic/word as well as many other third party apps. Not being able to Shift-Insert paste took my brain literally months to get used to when I switched to Mac like twenty years ago.

When I rarely find myself in Windows the muscle memory comes right back.

  > Just swapping the key caps is not enough. The keyboard also has to swap the scan codes it sends, since the code for Alt is the same as the code for ⌥, and the code for ⌘ is the same as the code for ⊞.

Windows always extends the selection in the direction of the key. But what Mac does I still haven’t managed to figure out. Sometimes it extends, sometimes it shrinks. Feels like a coin toss every time.

When I want to type an @ on a Windows machine, I accidentally press Windows-L and lock it. For Windows users, when they use a Mac, they might be tempted to press AltGr-Q, which quits the foreground application.

OS-specific abstractions should not leak to web apps under any circumstances.

Those shortcuts come from Emacs and shells adopted them.

For instance, in Portuguese, the Mac keyboard [1] has the + key two keys to the right of 0, and you use shift to input *. Meanwhile, on Windows [2], this key is one row below next to P, with the place it is on Mac occupied by «/». Most of the AltGr keys are also in different spots (particularly { and }), which makes this a major pain if you consistently switch between Windows and Mac.

Frankly I prefer the Mac layout, in part due to the Cmd/Ctrl split, but also because I believe it assigns more meaningful symbols to keys (I have literally never used «/», the internet will tell you that’s how quotations are done in Portuguese but everyone, books included, uses “/”).

I never saw any explanation as to why these differ. Does anyone know of any other languages where this happens? It doesn’t seem to be very common!

[1]: https://store.storeimages.cdn-apple.com/1/as-images.apple.co... [2]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/KB_Portu...

Also, 10 whippings for whomever at Apple decided to put the Fn/Globe key to the bottom left of laptop keyboards, and move Ctrl over. It's the first thing I swap on a Mac (used to use Karabiner, until macOS finally, years later, decided to implement the setting), and I always trip when using a colleague's laptop. These kids don't respect no traditions!

.. that rant over, I must recognize that Ctrl isn't used as much in GUI apps which prefer Cmd, and only us relatively few terminal junkies care.

[1] second most, perhaps, after swapping Delete & Backspace.

On some Windows layouts (those with the right alt = ctrl+alt trick), right alt is literally mapped to ctrl+alt. Right alt cannot be used to open the menu bar like the left alt can. This is only the case on those keyboards, on other keyboards, the right alt does move focus to the menu bar.

Mac uses cmd+arrows like Windows uses home, end, ctrl+home, ctrl+end. It uses option+arrows to move by word instead of control. (I doubt that what it considers a "word" is identical to Windows either, though many editors do override this anyway.

On some layouts (Polish is one I know of, though there are probably more), shift+backtick is a dead key on Windows and can be used to enter diacritics. Shift+accent followed by c inserts "ć". This is very painful to C++ (and Elixir) programmers, doubly so if you use the cFooManager systems Hungarian notation for class names. This is not the case on the Mac.

Option+letters are semi-dead (zombie?) keys on some layouts. For example, option+u inserts the ¨ accent, but option+u followed by another u combines them, so it inserts an ü. If you follow such a zombie key by a space, the space is swallowed and only the accent is inserted. Polish stupidly copied Option assignments from the US layout, replaced some with Polish diacritics, but never gave us replacements for the removed accents. So, we can now type symbols as useless as Ī or Ŕ, but "el niño" or "résumé" require the key hold and pop-up.

MacOS relies on menu options for things like copy and paste, as well as "Quit" and "Close Window". You should implement them by using the storyboard xCode gives you by default (or meticulously re-creating its included menu bar programmatically if your toolkit of choice doesn't let you do that), and then handle the appropriate selectors in your app if you need to. You should never handle these keyboard shortcuts yourself. MacOS is usually smart enough to figure out when these menu items should be dimmed and when they shouldn't. This doesn't work for custom UI frameworks, but if you use those, you ask for that kind of pain.

On both platforms, IMEs exist. Speakers of Chinese and Japanese want to type too.. Let them type. This involves painful OS integration that a lot of frameworks aren't doing.

On Mac, Option+backspace deletes to the beginning of the current word, but it keeps the space. On Windows (I think???) ctrl+backspace deletes the space.

On Windows, the shortcut to delete something (as in, an item in a list) is the delete key. Shift+delete is "irreversible delete" / "erase", AKA bypassing the recycle bin. On Mac, that's Cmd+Delete (which would be CMd+Backspace from a PC user's perspective).

On Mac, function keys are disabled by default (and perform the work of media keys). You need to combine them with fn to get the original behavior. Some older Macs (including older M-series macs) don't even have function keys at all, they instead have a touch bar. Don't rely on function keys for complex shortcuts.

On Mac, ctrl+arrows and command+space, while not being "reserved" in the traditional sense of the word, are often taken over by system functionality and never given to the app in the first place.