It happened because Windows adopted IBM CUA, and the ‘desktop Linux’ crowd had a fetish for copying Windows. Before that, X11 programs were typically fully conf

It happened because Windows adopted IBM CUA, and the ‘desktop Linux’ crowd had a fetish for copying Windows. Before that, X11 programs were typically fully configurable, with key bindings in X resources. Currently I think KDE is the least-bad option, as common shortcuts can be remapped globally, but it could be a lot better — Qt can universally remap ‘Control’ shortcuts to the GUI key, but it's only available on Mac builds.