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.
replyI 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.
I think gnome just had this as an option somewhere. Asking chatgpt says that this was removed in GTK4, so maybe it's no longer a thing?
replyI can still do everything in gnome with a shortcut, but not in vim style.
replyAnother 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.
replyOh so that is what this is for. I thought ctrl-q / ctrl-s are there as a nasty way to screw with users, who every now and then accidentally press one of these, and find their terminal frozen and no longer visibly reacting to input, for no apparent reason.
replyThat's actually XON/XOFF - in the old days when computers could send serial data to your VT100 or whatever faster than it could handle it (and we're talking 9600 baud here), the terminal would send XOFF (ctrl-S) telling the computer to stop sending - then, when the terminal caught up, it would send XON (ctrl-Q) to let the system know it could resume sending.
replyThe advantage of doing it this way ('software flow control') is it worked with just TX and RX lines, rather than having to connect up additional wires to indicate when the terminal was busy ('hardware flow control').
Ah this is also a fun default feature of Powershell, except it works on mouse click.
replythere was an old riddle I saw on usenet, "there is a key I use for one of its intended purposes several times a day, but when it stopped working I never missed it. what key was that?". the answer was the caps lock key, one of whose intended purposes was reverting back to normal after accidentally pressing it to go into caps mode.
replyYou can disable this misbegotten feature with
replystty -ixon
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replyI remember when the Pause key did that! It's long enough ago that I don't remember which systems did so, and most laptops don't even have a Pause key any more, but it was often very handy for reading fast-moving console output.
replyIt can’t always not interrupt your program. Think about it: after you press Control S to trigger XOFF, the fast output has to be buffered in memory. That memory is certainly not unlimited. There’s no way for the program to keep outputting text. Indeed some programs (including Claude Code, at least a while ago) really don’t like it when you press Control S and let the terminal be frozen for a very long time.
replyInteresting; I assumed the write to stdout would just hang for the writing program.
replyctrl+u and ctrl+k (to delete the line forward/backward from the cursor) are super useful too
replyctrl+u generally works for lots of password prompts to reset/remove what was typed, wherever you come across a password prompt and a keyboard including those two keys.
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