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For the places it doesn't work well, you can usually guess the reason. TextEdit and Safari respond to Command as the primary modifier, the same as any other Coc
by chrisfinazzo 5y ago
For the places it doesn't work well, you can usually guess the reason. TextEdit and Safari respond to Command as the primary modifier, the same as any other Cocoa application.
(FWIW, I just tried this in TextEdit's plaintext mode on Big Sur and it does indeed work - more than likely due to the UNIX heritage, the emacs bindings work here too)
It is well known that Command-L will focus the address bar and select any text that might be there, so overriding it is generally a bad idea if you can avoid it.
The same goes for 3rd parties - my Dad is a recent convert to macOS and is frequently stumped when Control-A doesn't select text in Microsoft Word - I explained this to him, but in the moment he sometimes forgets.
- kps 5y agoYou're mixing up Command-A (select all) with Control-A (Emacs-style beginning of line). The biggest and best thing about MacOS shortcuts is that they don't stomp over typing ASCII controls.
- chrisfinazzo 5y agoI am well aware of the shortcuts and just recreated the effect I described in TextEdit... 1. Type a sentence in TextEdit 2. Ctrl-A will go to the beginning of the line 3. Ctrl-E moves the cursor to the end It's a native app, and will dutifully select all text with Command-A - but the other keys still do something. A paradox, to be sure. I do blame Microsoft for the confusion I described, but I'm not sure there's a way they can solve it among their Mac customers without doing as you mentioned and making someone else's life difficult.
- jjoonathan 5y agoCtrl+a / ctrl+e should be home/end everywhere on mac, and they generally are, which is to say they work everywhere. If a mac app has mapped ctrl+a to select-all, this should not be called "working." It is an abomination and should be purged from the universe hastily and with extreme prejudice before the cancer spreads. I understand and sympathize with the difficulty of moving between ctrl/cmd as super keys, but there are a hundred shortcuts with the same problem and forcing mac to adopt the poor keyboard choices of windows is not the answer.
- chrisfinazzo 5y agoIf you are willing to leave behind rich text/word processing entirely (as I mostly have), it's not really an issue. It's everyone else who is so married to this idea which is a much harder nut to crack. The proliferation of many smaller writing apps (iAWriter, Byword, 1Writer, and on and on) on macOS means that many of these people probably could leave Word if they tried or switch to a plaintext app which can give you a styled preview (ahem, BBEdit) and they would be fine. Almost all of the features are there. It's just the comfort of Word as a known thing and the idea of how people use computers to create text which prevents them from taking that leap of faith.
- jjoonathan 5y agoAh, so Microsoft Office for Mac is the abomination. Disappointing but not surprising. Fortunately it's not just 3rd party writing apps that behave correctly. Pages, Keynote, even Google Docs all have the correct behavior.
- chrisfinazzo 5y agoYeah...if I wasn't clear about that before, Word is the primary culprit here.