Just as a nitpick: communities can (almost) never "get its act together", as they are comprised of people with different preferences who do not want to abandon their preferences for some abstract common good.
On a more substantive note (globally consistent actions from keystrokes). It would be great, but not going to happen because there are established modes where the same keystrokes lead to well known results. And those actions are different depending on the application. Maybe it would be good if this was not the case, but that ship has sailed a long time ago. MacOS is in sync because its BDFL (Apple) forces it to.
Example: Ctrl-Z. In a terminal, it suspends a process. In most GUI editors it performs undo. Shall we force a global standard? I would pay to watch a user get its editor suspended when he presses Ctrl-Z to undo a typo. Did the program crash? Let me start it again ... what does it mean it is already running?? Where are my edits??? I'll just reboot the machine!
So agreed, global synchronizations that would force this to happen are unlikely. Fortunately. My 2c.
> Just as a nitpick: communities can (almost) never "get its act together", as they are comprised of people with different preferences who do not want to abandon their preferences for some abstract common good.
That seems to be a defining characteristic of Linux communities, anyway. Not sure how you can say "all" communities are like that.
> Example: Ctrl-Z. In a terminal, it suspends a process. In most GUI editors it performs undo. Shall we force a global standard?
Haiku uses Alt instead of Ctrl for shortcuts (similar to macOS and the Cmd key), so Alt+Z does undo and Ctrl+Z suspends a process, both in the Terminal. (If you want to use Windows-style keybindings, then it's the reverse, of course.)
There's also complication that there's more than one standard. It's the same reason that emacs doesn't use conventional shortcuts even when it's running in a GUI: it's been using its current conventions since before the invention of the conventions that are now more popular. Similarly, if we just want to go by "preexisting standards" then really it's those newfangled applications that have hijacked ctrl-z to do anything other than suspending a process that are to blame.
> it's those newfangled applications that have hijacked ctrl-z
Yes. Windows botched this by hijacking the Control key, and the desktop-Linux crowd are unable to do anything but imitate Windows. Pre-Linux GUIs didn't have this problem, and MacOS doesn't have this problem.
How hard would it be to adapt a linux distro to have separate keys for control/command (a la MacOS). This is my single biggest blocker against using Linux as my daily driver - not having consistent keybaord shortcuts that avoid collision with terminal interrupts.
I think a KDE-based system could do it with modest effort. There's a flag deep in QT somewhere, enabled on Mac builds, that makes all the ‘Ctrl’ shortcuts default to ‘Command’ instead, and it would go a long way if that were a user-selectable option.
Actually, one thing which drives me to distraction is Emacs making C-Z a shortcut for minimising the window when using the GUI version. It's not a shell!!
It certainly makes sense when running inside a terminal. But when it's an X11 application, it makes me angry everytime I fumble C-X and it interrupts my workflow.
On a more substantive note (globally consistent actions from keystrokes). It would be great, but not going to happen because there are established modes where the same keystrokes lead to well known results. And those actions are different depending on the application. Maybe it would be good if this was not the case, but that ship has sailed a long time ago. MacOS is in sync because its BDFL (Apple) forces it to.
Example: Ctrl-Z. In a terminal, it suspends a process. In most GUI editors it performs undo. Shall we force a global standard? I would pay to watch a user get its editor suspended when he presses Ctrl-Z to undo a typo. Did the program crash? Let me start it again ... what does it mean it is already running?? Where are my edits??? I'll just reboot the machine!
So agreed, global synchronizations that would force this to happen are unlikely. Fortunately. My 2c.