Option (Alt) means "word". Opt+Left — move one word left, Opt+Right — move one word right.
Cmd means "all". Cmd+left — move to beginning of line, Cmd+right — move to the end of line, Cmd+up — move to the beginning of the text, Cmd+down — move to the end of text.
PgDown/PgUp/Home/End mean the same thing as in other systems, but without moving the cursor. All this might be a little frustrating at first, but it's muscle memory and you can figure the logic out in a couple of days. Don't fight the system, embrace it.
As for cmd+shift+g, you can look these shortcuts up in the menu, if you are not sure where to look, use help/search, type go to and the top item will be what you are thinking about. That said, finder still sucks.
My UK MacBook Pro keyboard has "alt" and doesn't mention "option" at all. They have also shipped keyboards that just say option (no mention of alt). Many of their keyboards have both printed on them.
In most of their user-facing documentation it is referred to as the "Option" key. In Cocoa, it is the "Alternate" key.
The menus don't mention either: they use the ⌥ symbol. Which is on some, but not all of their keyboards.
I was pleasantly surprised because the Windows/Linux systems tend to mask Control-A for select-all.
Linux maybe. I have never had it fail in windows and think you may be misremembering how it works.
(if there's something obvious that i'm missing someone please tell me!)
Shift-cmd: wow this program has a lot of commands that people want shortcuts for.
Shift-ctrl/alt: holy shit this program has a lot of commands.
Shift-ctrl-alt: this program is probably old enough to vote, and has a huge ton of commands
Alt: rarely used alone outside of terminal
Ctrl: see alt
Fn: NOT ON ALL KEYBOARDS. Used to force f-keys to output f-key codes instead of doing media control stuff, or to change cursors into page-up/dn/start/end.
Home and End behave differently, they move the viewport to the beginning or end of the document but do not move the cursor. They are like scrolling in that you don't lose your position. I'm not sure, but I think that page up and down (Fn-up and Fn-down) behave similarly. I never use these though.
> these is no way to remap system wide either, you need to do it on a per app basis
That isn't true. OS X actually has a very powerful and easy-to-use (but NOT easy-to-discover) method of controlling key bindings, and it applies instantly to ALL Cocoa applications (which, now that Finder and iTunes are Cocoa, means every common GUI application except Firefox).
This isn't my link, but here is an excellent site that describes the Cocoa text system:
http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/Site/Cocoa%20Text%20System....
And, if you're interested, here is the DefaultKeyBindings file that i've use on every OS X-based Mac i've ever had to fix Apple's default Home/End/PgUp/PgDn implementation:
https://github.com/ohkine/configs/blob/master/KeyBindings/De...
It would be useful if one could enter keystrokes into the search bar in the 'Help' panel. That would solve a lot of keystroke identification issues and familiarize them with OS X fairly quickly.
What to go to the end of a line? Click there. FWIW, I prefer ctrl-e and the other emacs bindings myself.