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Keyboard shortcuts are a big sticking point for me switching away from macOS. I expected I could wrestle Linux into something that resembles macOS shortcuts but

Keyboard shortcuts are a big sticking point for me switching away from macOS. I expected I could wrestle Linux into something that resembles macOS shortcuts but it’s tricky and inconsistent. The clearest example of where macOS excels with shortcuts is in a terminal window: Command+C for copy, Control+C to kill a process. Control+Shift+C just doesn’t cut it for me on Linux. I agree with you on software. Real package managers are great. I hate to say it, because it’s so against what Linux has been for 25 years, but it would be great if there was a $99 distro with a heavily tweaked window manager that looks consistent across most apps, doesn’t have huge top bars, and conforms to macOS keyboard shortcuts. A lightning fast Spotlight analog would be great too. I recognize I can probably get pretty close to this vision with a patchwork of already available software but I want someone to tie a bow on it and maintain it for me.

smallstepforman 6y ago
You just described Haiku
- artificial 6y ago
  Oh, what could’ve been. I really like what BeOS does, I’m sure there are analogs to this feature but it’s nice that it’s built in. https://www.haiku-os.org/documents/dev/node_monitoring https://www.haiku-os.org/documents/dev/node_monitoring
smoldesu 6y ago
I'm not going to use this as a platform to evangelize Linux, but I think you should give KDE a look. It looks really pretty out-of-the-box, and offers you a lot of control over the look and feel of your desktop. On top of that, it has a nearly endless list of keyboard shortcuts that can be rebound in the settings app painlessly. It's a far-cry from a lot of the other DEs I've used in the past, and the "batteries-included" mentality makes it a great analog for Mac and Windows users alike.
- kitsunesoba 6y ago
  KDE has a lot going for it but its customizability is so deep as to be daunting. Each time I've tried using it I've ended up burning hours trying to get every detail just right. I think it'd benefit quite a lot from including several sane sets of defaults to use as starting points.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - pnutjam 6y ago
    Opensuse has an excellent default kde.
    - eitland 6y ago
      Same with Neon IMO (it is developed by KDE people).
  - powersnail 6y ago
    The most recent update---a pretty big one---has improved the daunting experience a lot. A big factor of it being daunting, was that the settings were a mess. There are settings for appearances of the DE littered in different sections of system settings. This has been vastly improved. The default Breeze theme felt dated before (not in a good way); the new update had also improved on that. I'd say, that the default of the latest Plasma (5.21) is quite sane, to the point that I just chose Breeze Twilight (an included theme) without customization and had been happy since.
- jonwest 6y ago
  My biggest blocker isn’t a specific window manager, in that I can get a reasonable setup together in a relatively decent amount of time—it’s more around the fragmentation, or maybe my perceived fragmentation of the ecosystem as a whole. I’ll get things set up. Then I’ll look for some alternative of an application I’m used to on Mac. There’ll be something, but it was written for KDE and I’m running Gnome, or vice versa, and it looks and feels decidedly out of place. I’ll run something like Slack, or Spotify, and it’s sluggish and looks awkward next to all of my other windows. It’s not one big thing that keeps me in the Mac ecosystem. I don’t like the direction it’s headed in either, but every time I try to make the switch it’s like death by a thousand cuts of a bunch of little things trying to get things to a point where it feels comfortable and cohesive—and ultimately I need to be able to work—the time investment necessary to get something that allows me to just sit down and work (and deal with random little issues that pop up throughout the process) pushes me right back to Mac every time.
iso1210 6y ago
Why would I press a key to copy/paste? Highlight text, then middle click
- jagger27 6y ago
  Muscle memory, no middle click on most trackpads. It just feels weird coming from a browser after using Control+C to copy something and then having to use Control+Shift+V to paste. I never got used to the right click to paste paradigm. I expect a context menu.
  - iso1210 6y ago
    I've never used a non-mac laptop without a middle button. Muscle memory and 'the way things work' works both ways. You have to jump through hoops to do basic things like focus-follows-mouse/raise on click, multiple desktops, alt-drag to move a window etc (to be honest I'm not sure if you can even do those on a mac)
    - jagger27 6y ago
      ThinkPads are what I reach for on the PC side of things, and those still have a dedicated middle button for the most part. Otherwise I can't think of a single modern example of a laptop with a middle button. They're all click pads these days like Macs.
      - folmar 6y ago
        The standard unix 3rd button emulation is left+right click at the same time. Should work pretty much everywhere without configuration.
        magikaram 6y ago
        In the case of "tap to click", a 3 finger tap would also emulate this, or as a middle mouse click.
  - 6y ago
folmar 6y ago
You have a modifier key "Super", probably with Windows logo, which you can remap for the shortcuts you've had with command.
kuon 6y ago
When I switched from Mac to Linux a few years back, I also had this issue. My solution was radical, I switched to i3 and configured many, many customized shortcuts. Having to "re-learn" nearly everything made it easier because I was forcing a learning curve.
mplanchard 6y ago
Mostly I get by well enough by switching alt to ctrl, meta to alt, and ctrl to meta, plus caps lock mapped to ctrl. This gives me mostly an approximation of the Mac keyboard. Still have to remember the shift when copying and pasting in the terminal, but that’s not a huge deal because most of my terminal use is via emacs, where I have vim mode via evil, so copy and paste is done in normal mode with y and p. For me,a little bit of frustration with the keyboard is not so bad compared to the upsides.
- jagger27 6y ago
  I do Caps Lock to Control too, which frees up the bottom left key as a Function key on external keyboards.
- Tyr42 6y ago
  This, plus I just gave up and mapped ctrl+v to paste in terminal directly. Also alt-tab is now windows+tab, which is close enough.
elcritch 6y ago
I feel the pain. Unfortunately I gave up trying to get Firefox to understand/use super or hyper as command keys. Mostly however I get by fine with caps lock set as control with the exception of VSCode with the Vim plug-in overriding ctrl-c/ctrl-v and breaking copy/paste. Of course VSCode doesn't support super/hyper instead of control key on Linux.
- kps 6y ago
  Firefox _used to_ handle it (ui.key.accelKey = 91) but it's been buggy since Quantum.
perryizgr8 6y ago
> Control+Shift+C just doesn’t cut it for me on Linux. Use middle click.
horsawlarway 6y ago
Gnome terminal and all its derivatives support ctrl-c and ctrl-v natively for copy/paste if you just set those as the keybindings in its preferences. It then uses smart detection for when to send SIGINT vs copy/paste. if there's no running process, it copies on ctrl-c If there's a running process and no selected text, it sends sigint on ctrl-c If there's a running process and selected text, it copies It will always send sigint on ctrl-shift-c --- Frankly I wish they would just default to that setting. It's much more pleasant to use than having to remember a different copy/paste shortcut for working in the terminal. One of the first things I change on any new machine I setup for desktop use.
Fire-Dragon-DoL 6y ago
You can customize the entirety of the to of a terminal. I understand that this might be annoying, but macOS has it's fair share of "screwed up shortcuts" in spots that are not customizable easily (I did, with heavy use of a custom Karabiner config). The main one is word navigation/word selection/word deletion, which are not located all on the same modifiers (cmd), like it is on windows and linux

smallstepforman 6y ago

You just described Haiku

artificial 6y ago
Oh, what could’ve been. I really like what BeOS does, I’m sure there are analogs to this feature but it’s nice that it’s built in. https://www.haiku-os.org/documents/dev/node_monitoring https://www.haiku-os.org/documents/dev/node_monitoring

smoldesu 6y ago

I'm not going to use this as a platform to evangelize Linux, but I think you should give KDE a look. It looks really pretty out-of-the-box, and offers you a lot of control over the look and feel of your desktop. On top of that, it has a nearly endless list of keyboard shortcuts that can be rebound in the settings app painlessly. It's a far-cry from a lot of the other DEs I've used in the past, and the "batteries-included" mentality makes it a great analog for Mac and Windows users alike.

kitsunesoba 6y ago
KDE has a lot going for it but its customizability is so deep as to be daunting. Each time I've tried using it I've ended up burning hours trying to get every detail just right. I think it'd benefit quite a lot from including several sane sets of defaults to use as starting points.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- pnutjam 6y ago
  Opensuse has an excellent default kde.
  - eitland 6y ago
    Same with Neon IMO (it is developed by KDE people).
- powersnail 6y ago
  The most recent update---a pretty big one---has improved the daunting experience a lot. A big factor of it being daunting, was that the settings were a mess. There are settings for appearances of the DE littered in different sections of system settings. This has been vastly improved. The default Breeze theme felt dated before (not in a good way); the new update had also improved on that. I'd say, that the default of the latest Plasma (5.21) is quite sane, to the point that I just chose Breeze Twilight (an included theme) without customization and had been happy since.
jonwest 6y ago
My biggest blocker isn’t a specific window manager, in that I can get a reasonable setup together in a relatively decent amount of time—it’s more around the fragmentation, or maybe my perceived fragmentation of the ecosystem as a whole. I’ll get things set up. Then I’ll look for some alternative of an application I’m used to on Mac. There’ll be something, but it was written for KDE and I’m running Gnome, or vice versa, and it looks and feels decidedly out of place. I’ll run something like Slack, or Spotify, and it’s sluggish and looks awkward next to all of my other windows. It’s not one big thing that keeps me in the Mac ecosystem. I don’t like the direction it’s headed in either, but every time I try to make the switch it’s like death by a thousand cuts of a bunch of little things trying to get things to a point where it feels comfortable and cohesive—and ultimately I need to be able to work—the time investment necessary to get something that allows me to just sit down and work (and deal with random little issues that pop up throughout the process) pushes me right back to Mac every time.

iso1210 6y ago

Why would I press a key to copy/paste? Highlight text, then middle click

jagger27 6y ago
Muscle memory, no middle click on most trackpads. It just feels weird coming from a browser after using Control+C to copy something and then having to use Control+Shift+V to paste. I never got used to the right click to paste paradigm. I expect a context menu.
- iso1210 6y ago
  I've never used a non-mac laptop without a middle button. Muscle memory and 'the way things work' works both ways. You have to jump through hoops to do basic things like focus-follows-mouse/raise on click, multiple desktops, alt-drag to move a window etc (to be honest I'm not sure if you can even do those on a mac)
  - jagger27 6y ago
    ThinkPads are what I reach for on the PC side of things, and those still have a dedicated middle button for the most part. Otherwise I can't think of a single modern example of a laptop with a middle button. They're all click pads these days like Macs.
    - folmar 6y ago
      The standard unix 3rd button emulation is left+right click at the same time. Should work pretty much everywhere without configuration.
      - magikaram 6y ago
        In the case of "tap to click", a 3 finger tap would also emulate this, or as a middle mouse click.
- 6y ago

folmar 6y ago

You have a modifier key "Super", probably with Windows logo, which you can remap for the shortcuts you've had with command.

kuon 6y ago

When I switched from Mac to Linux a few years back, I also had this issue. My solution was radical, I switched to i3 and configured many, many customized shortcuts. Having to "re-learn" nearly everything made it easier because I was forcing a learning curve.

mplanchard 6y ago

Mostly I get by well enough by switching alt to ctrl, meta to alt, and ctrl to meta, plus caps lock mapped to ctrl. This gives me mostly an approximation of the Mac keyboard. Still have to remember the shift when copying and pasting in the terminal, but that’s not a huge deal because most of my terminal use is via emacs, where I have vim mode via evil, so copy and paste is done in normal mode with y and p. For me,a little bit of frustration with the keyboard is not so bad compared to the upsides.

jagger27 6y ago
I do Caps Lock to Control too, which frees up the bottom left key as a Function key on external keyboards.
Tyr42 6y ago
This, plus I just gave up and mapped ctrl+v to paste in terminal directly. Also alt-tab is now windows+tab, which is close enough.

elcritch 6y ago

I feel the pain. Unfortunately I gave up trying to get Firefox to understand/use super or hyper as command keys. Mostly however I get by fine with caps lock set as control with the exception of VSCode with the Vim plug-in overriding ctrl-c/ctrl-v and breaking copy/paste. Of course VSCode doesn't support super/hyper instead of control key on Linux.

kps 6y ago
Firefox _used to_ handle it (ui.key.accelKey = 91) but it's been buggy since Quantum.

perryizgr8 6y ago

> Control+Shift+C just doesn’t cut it for me on Linux. Use middle click.

horsawlarway 6y ago

Gnome terminal and all its derivatives support ctrl-c and ctrl-v natively for copy/paste if you just set those as the keybindings in its preferences. It then uses smart detection for when to send SIGINT vs copy/paste. if there's no running process, it copies on ctrl-c If there's a running process and no selected text, it sends sigint on ctrl-c If there's a running process and selected text, it copies It will always send sigint on ctrl-shift-c --- Frankly I wish they would just default to that setting. It's much more pleasant to use than having to remember a different copy/paste shortcut for working in the terminal. One of the first things I change on any new machine I setup for desktop use.

Fire-Dragon-DoL 6y ago

You can customize the entirety of the to of a terminal. I understand that this might be annoying, but macOS has it's fair share of "screwed up shortcuts" in spots that are not customizable easily (I did, with heavy use of a custom Karabiner config). The main one is word navigation/word selection/word deletion, which are not located all on the same modifiers (cmd), like it is on windows and linux