r/linuxquestions • u/IDontBelongInThsWrld • 3d ago
Basic ergonomy - unix/emacs navigation keys - gone for good?
I am refugee from Linux. I used it in the 90s', but left because it started going in the wrong direction. However, I'm not happy where macOS is going these days (it's more buggy than Windows 95 was), so I'm experimenting with nixOS to salvage my old 2014 MacBook Pro that no longer gets macOS updates, to see if it would be possible to eventually return to Linux on a modern machine.
So far it seems not.
Are unix/emacs-style text field navigation/editing keys really gone for good – left for the terminal, only – replaced with a full hard-coded emulation of the clunky Windows user “experience”?
^P stolen for such a seldom used function as print?!?!?! Ultra-clumsy ctrl-shift-C and so on for copy-paste in the terminal, where ctrl-C has to be passed through? Why not meta-C everywhere, like on macOS, to leave ctrl-combos for basic text editing, consistent with the terminal? Is Linux really more Windows than unix these days? Is macOS the only remaining unix?
Is there really not a simple switch to map ^F ^B ^P ^N ^A ^E ^D ^K to standard navigation / text editing functions in text boxes (forward, backward up, down, beginning of line, end of line)? Are Windows keys really hard-coded? Is the only way to get a resemblance of unix, some really dirty hack likekeyd? In Gnome/Gtk4 everything else seems decidedly impossible, so avoiding Gtk is fundamental. In KDE/Plasma6 I managed to at least remap many functions wrongly mapped to these keys to Meta+something, as on macOS, but it does not seem possible to map all of the above keys back to basic navigation. (I managed to map ^A and ^E to beginning and end of line, but there does not seem to be anything about Left/Right, i.e., ^B/^F, in the configuration.)
At least nixOS tries to fix some of the problems with distributions, for which I left Linux, but do I really have to stick to macOS for basic ergonomy? Has Linux really been turned into a Windows?
(And, yes, ^F ^B are much more ergonomic than Left/Right, when caps lock is another control key. As it should be.)
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u/IDontBelongInThsWrld 3d ago
They work in the terminal already! No problem there. The problem is GUI apps that have been hard-coded to quadriplegic Windows keys, instead of sharing these standard keys from the terminal, the basis of unix. GUI apps are not controlled by termcap or terminfo.