Tiling WMs tend to make heavy use of the super key. I would hate to lose all my keybinds because of copy/paste and such moving. I do think the macOS approach is conceptually cool (emacs/readline binds everywhere is neat) and makes sense, but I also hate actually using macOS, especially window management stuff. I guess if there were a way for people to have it both ways, all would be well.
How? They exist and they're customizable, unlike Windows's.
And I'll bet you you can't bind xkill to Ctrl-Alt-Esc, and your cursor turns into a little skull-and-crossbones, and whatever you click immediately vaporizes via a SIGKILL, on a Mac. :p
I'm referring specifically to the use of ctrl as a primary key for both the shell and the ux. How did this happen?
Anyway, keybindings are certainly changeable if you're ready to dive into a hundred distinct projects each defining their own key handling. There's no truly system wide way to alter system keybindings in any meaningful sense.
It happened because Windows adopted IBM CUA, and the ‘desktop Linux’ crowd had a fetish for copying Windows. Before that, X11 programs were typically fully configurable, with key bindings in X resources.
Currently I think KDE is the least-bad option, as common shortcuts can be remapped globally, but it could be a lot better — Qt can universally remap ‘Control’ shortcuts to the GUI key, but it's only available on Mac builds.
On balance, I really like that Ctrl is overloaded in that way. Means that Super/Win/Cmd can be used for a wide variety of things on top.
For example, I use Super for tiling window management, launching programs, and other things. On macOS, with Yabai and skhd, you can't use plain Cmd to do that.
Overloading Ctrl has downsides, but I think it is a net benefit overall.
I mean yea, but in practice I run into frustration that the terminal doesn't have a key dedicated to commands far more than I need to do something globally.
Anyway, you can use cmd, you just need to have an actual command (non-modifier-key) to pass it—I have no use for a key that does one thing.
The problem is that many apps on macOS use Cmd + one or more other modifiers for their own shortcuts. On Linux at least, no apps that I know of use Super in any shortcuts.
I'm trying to manage working on both Linux and MacOS, and this has been the number one frustration. Fortunately, toshy.app (as well as into) exists and does a pretty great job at mapping shortcuts to match MacOS.
