A web site inside a browser cannot resemble that and all the hacks to try to are not getting much close.
To do the same in Microsoft Office, you need to dick around with OneDrive and/or SharePoint. The last decade or so, I've only touched Office when someone sends me some .xls or .ppt file and I'm being lazy and just want to view it.
It's 2017, this is how we work now. My colleagues (literally) across the world are not going to connect to some shared NFS drive or whatever via VPN to store documents.
One drive for your personal documents only for you. One drive for your team only visible and editable by people in your team. One drive company wide with common stuff.
You can send a link to your colleagues and it just works! That doesn't support multiple editing though. That's how things were done historically.
Google doc is good to send a documents to a bunch of emails and see/edit the documents. It's terrible to write longer documents with advanced formatting, pictures and schemas.
For the most part I think what people care about is that things work as they expect, which is primarily 1) placement of UI elements, and 2) interaction with/between these elements. If that's done right, nobody cares if the UI is flat, dark, light, or has a leopard print background.
Now I do understand that there's some overlap in ui/skin concerns, but the distinction still seems crucial to me.
For example, the web is clearly not consistent on the 'skin' of things. But I often know where to find things based on their location (header nav menu's, footer contact details, etc.), or general look (loupe for search, wide rectangle for inputs, some kind of wide rectangle with a doodad on the right hand side for a drop-down). Or a combination of placement and look (a search input field is an input field in the top right of a typical page).
Even lots of computer-challenged people I know seem to do pretty well in this regard.
But as you say, when it comes to interacting with elements, as long as the developer doesn't override 'native' behavior, a web-solution can be very native.
On the other hand, the vast majority of cross-platform native apps I use often look close to native, but their 'core', inputs, selects, text fields, and so one, often feel off.
Honestly, I much prefer a non-native looking app that uses native UI elements over an app that has an 'uncanny valley' native look that is slightly off and UI widgets that don't behave natively.
That clipboard shortcuts work the same is the only one that I'm used to enough to be annoyed if it were done differently.
There's something about Mac fans that are very preoccupied with all of the details of how Macs work. I'm not criticizing that, you like what you like, but you shouldn't be surprised that I don't care about Spotlight indexing.
Shift+arrows — select characters
Option+arrows — jump between words or paragraphs
Cmd+arrows — jump to beginning/end of line or text
Shift+Option+arrows — select words or paragraphs
Option+Backspace — delete one word back
Cmd+A — select all
I actually used all of these except the last one while writing and formatting this comment! Plus clipboard shortcuts.
If you use vim in a terminal 100% of the time, none of those will matter to you because vim invents its own keyboard universe. But if you don't, I don't understand how you can have this opinion.
I get super annoyed with anything that somehow overrides these standard keyboard shortcuts, which is suprisingly often. Non-native UIs typically have to reimplement them because modern OSes have made the curious choice of not abstracting them.
I don't think it is a "Mac fans" thing. The exact same principles apply to Windows. Even to Linux, although the keyboard standardization there is next to non-existent. (I don't use Linux desktops often, but when I do, I get really frustrated that the terminals use Ctrl as a meta key instead of Command. So "copy" isn't Cmd+C, it's something like Ctrl+Alt+C.)
> If you use vim in a terminal 100% of the time, none of those will matter to you because vim invents its own keyboard universe.
I do, and this is one of the reasons I've never bothered with all of the details and shortcuts that you like.
Vim attempts to make the best possible text editor. It doesn't let "OS conventions" dictate what makes good text editing experience. What you get from apps staying to strict OS guidelines is a bunch of average -- not terrible but not inspiring -- applications.
* Text selection
* Caret behaviour (e.g. Option-arrows on macOS)
* Clipboard
* Spell check
* Open/save dialogs
* File system access
* Drag/drop
* Window management
* Accessibility (screen reader support etc.)
* Standard right click menus
* Indexing (e.g. Spotlight on macOS)
* etc.
You may be thinking to native UI idioms, which even Apple threw out the window several years ago.
Electron apps are mostly very good at the things in the above list, because the Chromium web renderer has spent years abstracting the mechanisms needed to feel native where it matters.
Non-native toolkits such as Swing and Qt also spent years trying to achieve native look/feel, mostly through emulation and host OS detection, and they still feel pretty crappy compared to Electron apps.
Slack, Spotify and friends do a good job of inventing their own "web but native-feeling" UI. An example of the exact opposite is Google Docs, which still, for all its technological impressiveness, feels like a crummy Swing app trapped in a web page. For example, Google Docs renders its own right-click context menus, which look and feel nothing like native context menus. Google Docs' mini-apps also have a menu bar and a toolbar, but it's part of the host window, so you get two levels of menu bars and tool bars.