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> In summary, earlier versions of OSX are perfectly fine (my one remaining mac is on 10.10), but Apple has not been doing itself any favors with the dev communi

> In summary, earlier versions of OSX are perfectly fine (my one remaining mac is on 10.10), but Apple has not been doing itself any favors with the dev community in more recent iterations of the OS. The GNU/Linux community also isn't bending to my will arbitrarily either. Frustrating, to say the least. In all seriousness, people are all happy to talk about how easy linux is to customize until you broach the subject of changing keybindings to use a mac-like scheme (using command for gui interactions as a rule of thumb, readline bindings everywhere there's text entry), and you find out this is pretty much impossible. In reality software is mostly customizable in the way the creators built it to be customized, including things like windowserver and macos mouse behavior and X11 and gtk and emacs and bash.

ColanR 7y ago
It seems like you're using OSes that are trying to cater to a diminishingly technical crowd. I read (somewhere, a year or so ago) that the generation now in their late 20s/early 30s was the last one that actually needed to care about how their computers worked, because their computers occasionally needed to be fixed. Generally speaking, I think that the newer generation has likely never been exposed to a computer that they could try to troubleshoot and fix themselves: everything is iPhone apps and Windows 7 / 10 and Andriod and slick websites. The information age no longer requires technical knowledge. As a result, I'd guess that most of the purchasers of new computers are in the generations above and below the ones with technical knowlege: the new generation, without the background to even care about being a power user, and the older generation where most aren't power users anyway. BTW, I'm using i3, and I think it would be (relatively) super easy to change the keybindings around to what you're describing. It sounds like you may need to find an OS that's designed to expose the level of customization that you want.
- msbarnett 7y ago
  > > people are all happy to talk about how easy linux is to customize until you broach the subject of changing keybindings to use a mac-like scheme (using command for gui interactions as a rule of thumb, readline bindings everywhere there's text entry) > BTW, I'm using i3, and I think it would be (relatively) super easy to change the keybindings around to what you're describing. Really? How does one go about configuring i3 such that, say, any time you hit ctrl-w it deletes backwards to the previous white space (a common readline binding) in any text entry box in, say, Firefox, IntelliJ, Spotify, VLC, Amarok, Gimp, etc? Are you quite certain that “readline bindings everywhere there’s a textbox” is really in the scope of i3’s customizations? What OP described goes quite a bit beyond window manager customization. > It sounds like you may need to find an OS that's designed to expose the level of customization that you want. On OS X this can be achieved by placing { "^w" = "deleteWordBackward:"; } in $HOME/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeybindings.dict, so I rather think he already is using an OS that exposes this level of pervasive customization.
  - xfer 7y ago
    How does that work? If i implement my own editor using sdl2, how will it know? Are you sure it's not just cocoa specific? If that's the case it's possible for gtk too.
    - msbarnett 7y ago
      > If i implement my own editor using sdl2, how will it know? Are you sure it's not just cocoa specific? If that's the case it's possible for gtk too. Of course it’s system textbox specific; if you reimplement your own, there is no magic involved. And obviously it’s possible in GTK. And KDE, and one-offs like Firefox, for that matter. I’d suggest that the fact that you have to do it in about 20 different ways to cover your common apps, and a few will not even offer this kind of configuration, is net-worse than the OS which makes this so easy because there’s a standard GUI toolkit that nearly everything uses. This doesn’t mean “Linux Bad, OS X Good”, but it is indicative of the fact that “Linux is configurable and OS X isn’t” is a very poor descriptor of reality. Configurability is a complex topic with a lot of different facets, and both OSes offer different ranges of ease of configurability in different areas. ColanR made the extraordinary claim that, ostensibly because he uses i3, “it would be (relatively) super easy to change the keybindings around to <command for gui interactions as a rule of thumb, readline bindings everywhere there's text entry>”. This is a very typical Linux user’s response in which they very narrowly equate mac keybindings with “window manager configuration”, when the flexibility offered by the system is in reality much broader than that.
      - xfer 7y ago
        Well, the point is all of this problem is there in osx too, since GTK, Qt, sdl2 and custom made windowing toolkit can all run in osx. I know atleast a few programs that people use on osx which break these conventions, hence it's not as universal as your proclaim. Unless you run only their store apps on your computer(which most likely no developer does), then maybe what you say makes sense. Otherwise it's not better than linux distros like elementary OS where convention is also to use gtk only apps(similar to cocoa only).

ColanR 7y ago

It seems like you're using OSes that are trying to cater to a diminishingly technical crowd. I read (somewhere, a year or so ago) that the generation now in their late 20s/early 30s was the last one that actually needed to care about how their computers worked, because their computers occasionally needed to be fixed. Generally speaking, I think that the newer generation has likely never been exposed to a computer that they could try to troubleshoot and fix themselves: everything is iPhone apps and Windows 7 / 10 and Andriod and slick websites. The information age no longer requires technical knowledge. As a result, I'd guess that most of the purchasers of new computers are in the generations above and below the ones with technical knowlege: the new generation, without the background to even care about being a power user, and the older generation where most aren't power users anyway. BTW, I'm using i3, and I think it would be (relatively) super easy to change the keybindings around to what you're describing. It sounds like you may need to find an OS that's designed to expose the level of customization that you want.

msbarnett 7y ago
> > people are all happy to talk about how easy linux is to customize until you broach the subject of changing keybindings to use a mac-like scheme (using command for gui interactions as a rule of thumb, readline bindings everywhere there's text entry) > BTW, I'm using i3, and I think it would be (relatively) super easy to change the keybindings around to what you're describing. Really? How does one go about configuring i3 such that, say, any time you hit ctrl-w it deletes backwards to the previous white space (a common readline binding) in any text entry box in, say, Firefox, IntelliJ, Spotify, VLC, Amarok, Gimp, etc? Are you quite certain that “readline bindings everywhere there’s a textbox” is really in the scope of i3’s customizations? What OP described goes quite a bit beyond window manager customization. > It sounds like you may need to find an OS that's designed to expose the level of customization that you want. On OS X this can be achieved by placing { "^w" = "deleteWordBackward:"; } in $HOME/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeybindings.dict, so I rather think he already is using an OS that exposes this level of pervasive customization.
- xfer 7y ago
  How does that work? If i implement my own editor using sdl2, how will it know? Are you sure it's not just cocoa specific? If that's the case it's possible for gtk too.
  - msbarnett 7y ago
    > If i implement my own editor using sdl2, how will it know? Are you sure it's not just cocoa specific? If that's the case it's possible for gtk too. Of course it’s system textbox specific; if you reimplement your own, there is no magic involved. And obviously it’s possible in GTK. And KDE, and one-offs like Firefox, for that matter. I’d suggest that the fact that you have to do it in about 20 different ways to cover your common apps, and a few will not even offer this kind of configuration, is net-worse than the OS which makes this so easy because there’s a standard GUI toolkit that nearly everything uses. This doesn’t mean “Linux Bad, OS X Good”, but it is indicative of the fact that “Linux is configurable and OS X isn’t” is a very poor descriptor of reality. Configurability is a complex topic with a lot of different facets, and both OSes offer different ranges of ease of configurability in different areas. ColanR made the extraordinary claim that, ostensibly because he uses i3, “it would be (relatively) super easy to change the keybindings around to <command for gui interactions as a rule of thumb, readline bindings everywhere there's text entry>”. This is a very typical Linux user’s response in which they very narrowly equate mac keybindings with “window manager configuration”, when the flexibility offered by the system is in reality much broader than that.
    - xfer 7y ago
      Well, the point is all of this problem is there in osx too, since GTK, Qt, sdl2 and custom made windowing toolkit can all run in osx. I know atleast a few programs that people use on osx which break these conventions, hence it's not as universal as your proclaim. Unless you run only their store apps on your computer(which most likely no developer does), then maybe what you say makes sense. Otherwise it's not better than linux distros like elementary OS where convention is also to use gtk only apps(similar to cocoa only).