It's easy to brush off the millions of things that computers allow us to do that we couldn't do before because of some terrible UIs.
Computers suck, the internet sucks, but the pony express and cargo boats sucked worse. I can get a message across the world in about a second. No applause for that though. No praise for the things we can now do. We're just too eager to find things we wish we could do, and blame our current technology for not knowing our dreams.
If only those pesky users would just read the source code, they’d understand why this site works when you put www in front of it but doesn’t work without it! And if they want it changed, well it’s open source! They should send a pull request!
It's Control-A in every app!
(or Up if it's a one line text field)
I haven't seen any macOS applications that don't accept Ctrl-A (or any other Emacs-style shortcuts, while we're at it). Maybe I just haven't looked hard enough.
After all, we do that too with git and containers.
If you broke your editor's buttons / view settings, but also typed a dozen pages, you don't want to undo your typing to undo your settings changes.
One way to do everything robs people of their ability to think.
Under that definition, I don't think that there's ever been a successful developer. I'd set the bar more at the ecosystem level. Once a user learns how an ecosystem works, the software in it should be as intuitive as the complexity of their tasks allow. Anything more seems like making perfect the enemy of good.
No, they're amazing machines and don't suck. They just don't meet our arbitrarily high expectations.
But [thread] OP is correct. UIs absolutely do suck.
The proof is that after fifty years of UI design, there's still no such thing as a standard system/technique/anything for assessing the quality, reliability, and effectiveness of a user interface.
There's been almost no effective research into cataloguing the most common kinds of user error OR developer error and designing systems that minimise those errors.
There's a lot of tribal and religious noise about operating systems and languages, but virtually none of it is based on empirical research.
I realise this isn't really the crux of your post, and I broadly agree with you that computers still suck. But the answer to this question is CMD + left arrow. I have no idea what applications you're using where this doesn't work.
The real answer is, computers suck. Seriously, computers are effing awful machines, all developers are hackers, and the only reason things haven't changed is because we constantly lie to ourselves that we're okay with the world.
Passwords suck, no one can remember them, we have way too many of them to remember, and every damn site needs its own special password requirements. And on top of that every site needs its own username requirements too, so there's two things to forget. And email is the universal password, so you want to make sure you use a good password there, but you never really log into your email, do you? The password is saved. So when you get logged out somehow, good luck remembering the password.
And don't get me started on keyboard shortcuts. At least Windows is consistent, quick question: what's the keyboard shortcut on a Mac to go to the beginning of your current line? Ah trick question, it's different for every god damned application! And some applications don't even allow for that without highlighting the entire line!
There's a reason "digital natives" are great at using phones and choose to use them more. iOS and Android were built from scratch and could learn from all of the mistakes of the old systems. In the process, they came up with a ton of their own mistakes (3D touch and long press each do different things? Really? Also TouchWiz is just a bad idea), but consistency and focus are major wins here.
Computers suck and people get scared. Only having one app on the screen at once, only having one way to do things... that's what people like. It's not perfect, but man computers suck. Anything that makes them suck less is a huge win.