Word and like jumps in Windows also felt backwards to me, doing the equivalent of w instead of e in vim, and couldn't be consistently combined with shift.

Support for Alt+Dpad(+Shift) and Command+Dpad(+Shift) is important IMO. As well as Double/Triple-click+Drag: it should select additional units not letters.

These last paragraphs are OS-level but the features were missing or inconsistent.

I just tried this in macOS (Catalina), in Chrome while I happened to be looking at a design page in figma.com and nothing happened.

Not so surefire I guess. To be fair - I assume the web page was capturing that shortcut. It worked on the new tab page.

The point though is that this is an app thing, not a macOS thing. If every app on Windows and Linux decided to use the same exact shortcut for opening preferences, then we'd have that. On macOS, Apple does not strictly enforce Cmd+, for opening preferences - any macOS app can use that for whatever they want.

> Word and like jumps in Windows also felt backwards to me...

Jumping words is done with Ctrl+left/right arrow in Windows and Linux. On macOS it's Option+left/right arrow. On all systems, it can be combined with Shift to highlight the word.

> Support for Alt+Dpad(+Shift) and Command+Dpad(+Shift) is important IMO. As well as Double/Triple-click+Drag: it should select additional units not letters.

Not sure what this means, but on my Linux desktops I have absolute freedom to make my keyboard and mouse to do just about anything I can dream of. Meanwhile, in macOS I am often told that if I am not loving the way that Apple has chosen for me to behave, then I must be expecting the wrong thing...

[1]: ± some depending on if you count multiple ways of creating the same character, etc. Eg. ‘≠’ can be made by combining / and = in either order. Also ‘Compose, number, s’ for footnotes, ‘Compose, +, -’ → ±, ‘Compose , <, '’ → “‘”, ‘Compose, -, >’ → “→”, ‘Compose, =, >” → “⇒” are nice. And υɳⅰеηⅽоⅾе.

0: https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/

1: https://blog.jkl.gg/hacking-your-keyboard/

This is why I don't use Linux on the desktop. (About half of my servers are Linux.)

Every couple of years I'll bring out my old HP laptop and spend most of a week installing all the newest desktop environments to see how they've progressed. I'm always disappointed.

I've been counting on Linux to be the big disruptor for two decades now. But more and more it's just becoming the poor man's Windows, by aping Windows conventions.

If I want Windows, I'll run Windows. If I want macOS, I'll run macOS. What I want is something different, not something that tries to be a watered-down version of both.

In 2009ish I had a ui where you could zoom out to a giant wall and rearrange all the windows on your virtual desktops and use a macish expose to bound to a mouse key to pick from the windows on the current desktop. The visual metaphor was better than macs and windows and to boot there were so many knobs you could tweak virtually anything.

Tiling window managers like i3wm and 17 more are both minimal and powerful. Notably i3 has MUCH more powerful keybindings and treats individual monitors as virtual desktops.

With xmonad your window manager is a haskell program with awesome a lua one.

If you want to go all in on emacs you can make it your window manager too.

Honestly its only windows lite if you want it to be so and really everyone is basically xerox lite to some degree or another because we are basically using the same basic metaphors described therein.

I used to hate Mac shortcuts, because I never really spent more than 30 minutes with the system. I think there is nothing to hate - they are just different and IMO better.