alt Hacker NewsThere are several keyboard shortcuts that you would never find out from watching an agent, but are mindblowing to new Linux users. I suck at remembering vim keybindings, but I have ingrained ctrl+a ctrl+e for jumping to the start/end of a string (which also works all over OS X). I had been a developer for an embarassing amount of time before I discovered those.
There are other terminal specific shortcuts for removing last word (ctrl+w) but they don't seem to be as portable.
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gosub100 • today at 6:59 PM
Another one, not quite as handy but still awesome: ctrl s / ctrl-q. This freezes/unfreezes the terminal output so you can read it, without interrupting your program. Useful for very fast walls of text.
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The OS-wide Emacs bindings are one of the main things still keeping me on macOS; in editors like Helix (or Zed with Helix mode) I invoke these really cursed combinations of the Helix(vim-like) shortcuts in the editor with the Emacs ones from the OS and it feels really natural as a means of moving around text.
I haven't put in enough effort to replicate the experience on GNOME but once I jump ship from Apple I'll have to.
The way macOS treats shortcuts thanks to the separation of Command and Control is great. It even makes Google Docs pretty painless to use because it's mostly like Emacs. Word still tries to hijack the shortcuts so that's suboptimal.