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I 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

I 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 ago
Ctrl+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 ago
  If 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 ago
    Ah, 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 ago
      Yeah...if I wasn't clear about that before, Word is the primary culprit here.

jjoonathan 5y ago

Ctrl+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 ago
If 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 ago
  Ah, 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 ago
    Yeah...if I wasn't clear about that before, Word is the primary culprit here.