This is a really interesting and complete writeup.

I have been helping someone who has little experience with Windows or Mac, but used DOS for years ( until pretty recently ) and I've set them up with a simple Debian Linux running XFCE4 as the desktop. I've found that I have to teach them and also document a lot of basic computer idioms -- Control-C / X / A / V to copy, cut, select all, paste; but also more basic things, like the fact there are two pointers on the screen -- one for the mouse and one for the keyboard -- if you slide the mouse pointer to a specific point and press a keyboard key, the new key will not appear where the arrow is, it will appear where the text cursor is.

A big one was tabs. I had to get a couple of manilla folders and show them the actual tabs, and hold it up next to the browser with several tabs, and suddenly it snapped with them what the interface was trying to represent.

Control-A will select all of a web page, unless you are in the text entry box of a form, then it selects just the things in that text entry box.

I started writing this up in a little manual, it got to a dozen pages fast, and I haven't put very much in it.

If anyone knows of a place where some portion of all of this is written down, post a link !

> and Macs offer ⌘ Command, ⌥ Option, ⌃ Control, and ⇧ Shift

This is traumatizing for me. I tried to switch to a mac for home use and failed because of keyboard handling. Using Polish diacritics (made with right alt) wasn't obvious at first. I was able to switch keyboard settings to mimic Linux/Windows, but it's just not there. Control and Command confusion haunts me. I dropped the platform because of this and know a few people who stayed on iphones, but also dropped Macs because of keyboard.

I once tried to "find myself" on linkedin search bar on someone else's Mac. I though "I got this, I'm a mac user now!" and managed to close the browser tab and open some random programs...

I admire people who jump between those platforms. Even more for languages that don't have standardized alphabet mappings, like Bulgarian (it seems they don't have consensus there).

In a similar vein, the "Costs of Switching Schoolchildren Between Windows, Chrome, Mac?" (https://slashdot.org/submission/17349696/costs-of-switching-...) begins:

If you've ever made the jump from PC to Mac (or vice versa) at work or home, you're painfully aware that there are very real costs of switching platforms in terms of lost knowledge and productivity. In addition to flushing years of accumulated knowledge down the toilet — goodbye Outlook-Teams-OneDrive-SharePoint-Excel-Word-PowerPoint-VBA, hello GMail-Workspace-GDrive-Sheets-Docs-Slides — there's also the matter of a thousand UI and other "paper cuts" to contend with ("Why are you looking for a 'prt sc' key," condescendingly replies a Mac aficionado in response to a question from a former Windows user, "when Shift+Command+3 is so intuitive?").

The delete key thing comes from how Windows descends from DOS which always had the cursor ON a character (blinking box kind of thing) whereas the Mac had the cursor as a thin line BETWEEN characters.

Technically DOS could have had "backspace" (delete the character BEFORE the cursor), "delete" (delete the character on/under the cursor), and "forward delete" (delete the next character AFTER the cursor).

  > Just swapping the key caps is not enough. The keyboard also has to swap the scan codes it sends, since the code for Alt is the same as the code for ⌥, and the code for ⌘ is the same as the code for ⊞.

Mac got the Command key right. Windows got the Home and End keys right. Wish we could have both on one system.

Asahi and GNOME teams, please take this as an guide to implement ”Mac input compatibility mode”!

Dual booting between a MacOS and Linux is a painful process of manual keyboard and shorcut overrides to get the linux side somewhat to the (better) mac way of doing this.

> What Windows calls ⏎ Enter, Mac calls ⏎ Return.

I'm not an Apple person at all, but this is one of the hills I die on. The "Enter" key is for entering data, submitting a field, etc. The "Return" key is for returning the carriage, i.e. starting a new line. Importantly, those two are different functions! The only keys that exist twice on the keyboard are modifier keys (Ctrl, Shift, sometimes Super and Alt). The Return or Enter keys do not need to exist twice. Clearly these are meant to be two different functions, because they are two different keys on the keyboard.

To my wife's annoyance, I teach my children the correct names for these keys.

When I switched from Win to Mac 20+ years ago I immediately noticed how much more ergonomic cmd-C was versus ctrl-C… for the latter the thumb has to fold under the palm of hand.

Not even mentioning the general well thought out and more logical key-combinations.

The strangest key for the switch was return for file rename… I now miss it on every other system that hasn't mapped it like this.

I've been forced off of Linux at work. It was Windows or OSX, so I went OSX. I have not been impressed. Partially because 20 years of using certain shortcuts is not a habit that is fun to break. Especially when I go back home and can use Linux again.

I've been looking for a good Karabiner setup that makes things work like base Ubuntu (gnome shell shortcuts). Haven't found one yet. Anyone know of a good one?

Especially one that fixes ctrl-arrow keys so they go word by word, and ctrl-shift-home/end so it only selects the 1 line instead off going all the way to the top or bottom.

Thanks!

Also, the original post is going to be a huge help for a lot of people. So if the author happens to read this, thanks!

The demo keyboards in the article, I'm pretty sure are wrong.

The "Start" or Windows key is the same as the "Command" key

"Alt" is the same key as "Option"

This is how every keyboard I've ever used has worked. This is usually how they work when you plug a PC keyboard into a Mac or vice-versa.

Personally the biggest problem (outside the Ctrl/cmd c/v conflict) is that as a UK ISO user, Macs botched the key on the top left, next to the 1.

I subsequently have to set my Mac keyboard layout to PC to fix backticks and remove that key that is never used, and rely on my touch typing. It does also mean that no one will ever try to type on my laptop.

> A small group of vocal users love these.

That's me! readline everywhere by default is fantastic and should be immediately copied by every Linux DE!

I like these types of articles.

One note:

> Access to extra characters

For German keyboard layouts, there exists „Erweiterte Tastaturbelegung 1“ standardised in DIN 2137-01:2023-08. It's available in Windows 11 (since 24H2) and also in Debian Linux for example. It lets you enter all characters from European alphabets plus some nice extra ones. <https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/E1_(Tastaturbelegung)> has the details.

> What Windows calls ⏎ Enter, Mac calls ⏎ Return. However, Macs also have an ⌤ Enter, although only on a numeric keypad

Just looked down on my windows keyboard and yes, the return key (the one above the right shift key) says "enter". That did not use to be the case. The return key used to say return and the tall key next to 3 and the numpad used to be the only enter key.

When did that change in PC land? I remember reading nerdy articles about the difference between return and enter.

No mention of the RSI caused by the Mac control key being in a place where a user has to scrunch up their hand unnaturally just to perform the most common control commands, copy and paste?

That was a deep dive indeed! Some notes:

> On a Mac, in simple input fields, ↑ and ↓ jumps to the beginning and end [...] Windows doesn’t have this convention

IIRC it worked for me on Windows (and Linux :-) as well!

I do prefer ⌘←→ as it’s more consistent. Also, ⌥←→ jumps one word back/forward on Mac, the Windows equivalient being ⌃←→.

> On Windows, [refresh is] typically F5, although some browsers now support Ctrl+R, too

Have always supported as far as I can remember :) F5 works on Mac in Firefox (and I think Chromium), but not in Safari.

> On both platforms, Fn+↑↓ does PgUp/ PgDn, and Fn+←→ does Home/End.

This will vary a lot depending on the manufacturer. ThinkPad T420 and other models from that era use those for media keys (which makes sense, they do have physical Home/End/PgUp/Dn keys).

---

Finally, a suggestion to fellow Linux users: try Mac keybindings, it’s amazing (especially if you’re e.g. running Asahi on a Macbook). Not all apps will be happy about this, but at least the KDE ones will generally follow the keybindings you set in the system settings.

One thing I prefer on Mac keyboards is how heavily the CMD key is use for things I do often and where it is in relation to my thumb. For copying for example, CMD+C is _right there_. It's been a while since I last had a Mac, and my thumb has learned the CTRL+C stretch, but Mac was easier for that.

Mac's German keyboard was always pain for writing code. This is less relevant today because most of the input has become natural language so no need for brackets and other non alphanumeric symbols (which are terribly painful key combinations on Mac German keyboards).

Really wish windows and Linux had the same 4 modifier system as Mac, always feels like ctrl is overloaded on Linux and alt wrongly used as a ctrl key in weird scenarios on windows (alt+F4)

> What Windows calls ⏎ Enter, Mac calls ⏎ Return. However, Macs also have an ⌤ Enter, although only on a numeric keypad (previously, it was even there on laptops! [1]). On keyboards without the physical Enter key, you can simulate it via Fn+Return.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_G3#/media/File:Apple...

I have spent literally several minutes scanning this keyboard for a physical Enter (as opposed to Return) and have no idea what the author is talking about.

What always trips me about the German QWERTZ layout.. I am used to Mac keyboards.

When I want to type an @ on a Windows machine, I accidentally press Windows-L and lock it. For Windows users, when they use a Mac, they might be tempted to press AltGr-Q, which quits the foreground application.

> Windows still supports Shift+Delete for cut, Ctrl+Insert for copy, and Shift+Insert for paste. I am not sure how many people use these.

So I grew up using DOS and these were pretty universal across edit/qbasic/word as well as many other third party apps. Not being able to Shift-Insert paste took my brain literally months to get used to when I switched to Mac like twenty years ago.

When I rarely find myself in Windows the muscle memory comes right back.

Aside for a peculiar trackpad issue:

Does anyone else have problem scrolling diagonally on a page that's a bit zoomed in(like on HN, you zoom in a little to read the threads)? It just doesn't move smoothly and instead does a staircase shape traversal.

This used to occur on all browsers before upgrading to Tahoe, now it's mostly fixed but still persists on Safari.

For reference: https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1hh5yjo/diagonal_tra...

> Windows still supports Shift+Delete for cut, Ctrl+Insert for copy, and Shift+Insert for paste. I am not sure how many people use these.

Shift inset is handy when ssh-ing intobabtemoyr machine with Python windows.

Text selection with arrow keys is missing from the article. When you have select a word, the Shift+Arrow keys work differently between Mac and Windows.

Windows always extends the selection in the direction of the key. But what Mac does I still haven’t managed to figure out. Sometimes it extends, sometimes it shrinks. Feels like a coin toss every time.

It took me a bit after I had to switch to a Macbook, but by now I'm pretty used to switching between Linux and Mac. But the one thing I'm still not used to after a few years is the position of []. It's still a 50/50 whether I hit it on mac

mac treats modifier keys like modifier keys whereas windows treat super key as modifier key and start menu key (which is weird)

Didn't know backspace is called delete on Apple products. Explains why one commercial vibecoded project management product used it to delete the whole item I was working on when I missed a text box.

OS-specific abstractions should not leak to web apps under any circumstances.

Text fields in Mac OS apps and web browsers/ websites use some of the standard Unix/ Linux shortcuts based on the ⌃ Control key:

Those shortcuts come from Emacs and shells adopted them.

I just wish Apple would get back to making decent electromechanical keyboards.

speaking of mac keyboard, I have macbook pro m1 with touch bar and the touch bar blinks like hell and it is been like this for years and it seems like a software bug because when you put flash light on the screen dimming sensor it goes away or atleast blinks less. I reported the bug many times, I checked apple forum lots people has the same issue but no fix yet. is there anyone who has a solution for this? I dont want update my mac just because of this.

One thing I never see mentioned, probably because it’s not very common, is that on some languages the Mac has a completely different position for symbol keys! This makes using a Mac keyboard on Windows (or vice-versa) extremely annoying (Linux tends to support the Mac layout as well so it’s fine).

For instance, in Portuguese, the Mac keyboard [1] has the + key two keys to the right of 0, and you use shift to input *. Meanwhile, on Windows [2], this key is one row below next to P, with the place it is on Mac occupied by «/». Most of the AltGr keys are also in different spots (particularly { and }), which makes this a major pain if you consistently switch between Windows and Mac.

Frankly I prefer the Mac layout, in part due to the Cmd/Ctrl split, but also because I believe it assigns more meaningful symbols to keys (I have literally never used «/», the internet will tell you that’s how quotations are done in Portuguese but everyone, books included, uses “/”).

I never saw any explanation as to why these differ. Does anyone know of any other languages where this happens? It doesn’t seem to be very common!

[1]: https://store.storeimages.cdn-apple.com/1/as-images.apple.co... [2]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/KB_Portu...

Over the years, I've grown so accustomed to using Mac keyboards on Windows that I swap the positions of the left Alt and Windows keys when using PC keyboards.

I recently got a Linux desktop after being Mac-only for a long time and using Linux only as a deploy target, and holy shit: the modifier key situation on PCs is so bad.

Control specifically is just a terrible modifier key for common things like edit commands. First, it sits near your pinky instead of your thumb, making chording it with Z, X, C, V, etc., really difficult.

But then... who decided that ctrl-c should be used for both copy and abort??? That's diabolical levels of messed up. In a terminal app ctrl-c aborts, so you need to use shift-ctrl-c to copy, and now you have two shortcuts for the same operation you need to remember based on context, except that in a web-based terminal in Chrome shift-ctrl-c opens "Inspect Element Mode" and now you have no way to copy!

Am I the only one who finds this astoundingly frustrating?

I come from a different era. Back in the 70s and 80s every home or business computer worked differently (BBC, Aplle ][, Spectrum, Commodore, etc); at Uni we used DOS computers, a Prime mini-computer and some stuff I can't remember; My first job was also using a Prime, and DOS, and various Unix workstations running Motif or OpenWindows. Getting used to a new way of doing things on almost every computer you rocked up to was the normal state of affairs. Kids these days.....

I thought ⌘ denoted a place of interest. I found many an interest spot just pulling off the road when seeing that

The most [1] annoying difference to me is the Alt/Cmd vs Win/Alt key swaps. In this case, Mac has precedence, and Microsoft decided they would place their new Windows key to the left of Alt.

Also, 10 whippings for whomever at Apple decided to put the Fn/Globe key to the bottom left of laptop keyboards, and move Ctrl over. It's the first thing I swap on a Mac (used to use Karabiner, until macOS finally, years later, decided to implement the setting), and I always trip when using a colleague's laptop. These kids don't respect no traditions!

.. that rant over, I must recognize that Ctrl isn't used as much in GUI apps which prefer Cmd, and only us relatively few terminal junkies care.

[1] second most, perhaps, after swapping Delete & Backspace.

I switched to Mac 20 years ago and am still mourning the loss of my Home and End keys. Karabiner doesn’t reliably fix it neither does anything else.

What I'd add is:

On some Windows layouts (those with the right alt = ctrl+alt trick), right alt is literally mapped to ctrl+alt. Right alt cannot be used to open the menu bar like the left alt can. This is only the case on those keyboards, on other keyboards, the right alt does move focus to the menu bar.

Mac uses cmd+arrows like Windows uses home, end, ctrl+home, ctrl+end. It uses option+arrows to move by word instead of control. (I doubt that what it considers a "word" is identical to Windows either, though many editors do override this anyway.

On some layouts (Polish is one I know of, though there are probably more), shift+backtick is a dead key on Windows and can be used to enter diacritics. Shift+accent followed by c inserts "ć". This is very painful to C++ (and Elixir) programmers, doubly so if you use the cFooManager systems Hungarian notation for class names. This is not the case on the Mac.

Option+letters are semi-dead (zombie?) keys on some layouts. For example, option+u inserts the ¨ accent, but option+u followed by another u combines them, so it inserts an ü. If you follow such a zombie key by a space, the space is swallowed and only the accent is inserted. Polish stupidly copied Option assignments from the US layout, replaced some with Polish diacritics, but never gave us replacements for the removed accents. So, we can now type symbols as useless as Ī or Ŕ, but "el niño" or "résumé" require the key hold and pop-up.

MacOS relies on menu options for things like copy and paste, as well as "Quit" and "Close Window". You should implement them by using the storyboard xCode gives you by default (or meticulously re-creating its included menu bar programmatically if your toolkit of choice doesn't let you do that), and then handle the appropriate selectors in your app if you need to. You should never handle these keyboard shortcuts yourself. MacOS is usually smart enough to figure out when these menu items should be dimmed and when they shouldn't. This doesn't work for custom UI frameworks, but if you use those, you ask for that kind of pain.

On both platforms, IMEs exist. Speakers of Chinese and Japanese want to type too.. Let them type. This involves painful OS integration that a lot of frameworks aren't doing.

On Mac, Option+backspace deletes to the beginning of the current word, but it keeps the space. On Windows (I think???) ctrl+backspace deletes the space.

On Windows, the shortcut to delete something (as in, an item in a list) is the delete key. Shift+delete is "irreversible delete" / "erase", AKA bypassing the recycle bin. On Mac, that's Cmd+Delete (which would be CMd+Backspace from a PC user's perspective).

On Mac, function keys are disabled by default (and perform the work of media keys). You need to combine them with fn to get the original behavior. Some older Macs (including older M-series macs) don't even have function keys at all, they instead have a touch bar. Don't rely on function keys for complex shortcuts.

On Mac, ctrl+arrows and command+space, while not being "reserved" in the traditional sense of the word, are often taken over by system functionality and never given to the app in the first place.

what is most awful, is that sublime text isnt the same with windows keyboard in mac, than it is in windows. and cannot be.. so had to abandon mac

I’ve only ever used Windows, so I think Windows is better.

I wish i had mac hardware with a fully supported Linux OS. There are some options but most have bad hardware. I kind of wish Apple would just "unlock" its hardware for other options like Linux.