During my M.Tech in Comp. Sci, I was requested to volunteer to be a lab assistant in a diploma course in programming in C for non-technical people. A Ph.D. in Philosophy was complaining that his program was not compiling. He wrote "exist(0)" instead of "exit(0)". I found this so interesting. Existentialism was on his mind, I guess. The program clearly exits by not existing any more? Can't argue with that!

I corrected him and went on my rounds. I remember that a bank manager was the best of the batch. By the time I circled back to my philosophy friend, he quietly changed "exit()" back to "exist()" and the program was not compiling again! This anecdote stayed in my mind.

I remember that a lot of older folks had trouble understanding when to use a single click and when a double click. Clicking twice rapidly was also difficult for them, and they would consistently jerk the mouse and drag things around. Having every part of the interface in earlier windows draggable and reactive made this even more frustrating, since for them things would just disappear from the desktop.

There were plenty of stories back in the day about assistants being asked to copy a floppy.

Some used a photocopier.

"which was perfectly correct for someone not being used to computers."

I disagree.

Even someone with no experience with computers understands, generally speaking, that the mouse is tracking the surface of the desk somehow. I have had this conversation many times (or did, back in the 1990s when mice were more novel for most people). Nobody picked it up.

The ones who do in these anecdotes are, IMO, examples of the sort of people who absolutely shut their brains off in protest when asked to work with new tech. I have been blessed in that I have only very, very rarely been asked to work with or even know such people.

Focus follows mouse was a thing in the X11 era too. We are still in the X11 era, and it is still a thing. (-: Until X11 window managers like IceWM vanish entirely, it will remain a thing.

* https://ice-wm.org/manual/#focus-models

They were familar with a mouse from DOS based drawing and diagram programs. Most of those did not have keyboard and mouse input active at once, you were using the mouse, or you were in a different mode to enter text. Some of them had one pointer, so you could be typing, bump the mouse, and put characters in the wrong place.

The tabs in question covered modern Firedox, xfce4-notes-plugin, and I think gedit. It was the concept of tabs, not the appearance. None of them looked that much like the tab on a manilla file folder.

macOS supports emacs-like bindings natively: Ctrl-A/Ctrl-E for line start/end, Ctrl-K to kill, Ctrl-Y to yank, Ctrl-F/Ctrl-B for forward/back, etc.

They are defined in /System/Library/Frameworks/AppKit.framework/Resources/StandardKeyBinding.dict. You can create ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict to augment or override those.

Anything built on AppKit that uses the standard text system (NSTextView, NSTextField, and the field editors that back them) supports those bindings “for free”.

For non-native apps, Karabiner Elements⁽¹⁾ is the answer, using a config like this⁽²⁾.

⁽¹⁾ https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/

⁽²⁾ https://github.com/pdelfino/karabiner-config

GNOME:

    gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-key-theme-name 'Emacs'

or GTK:

     ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini
     ~/.config/gtk-4.0/settings.ini


    [Settings]
    gtk-key-theme-name = Emacs

I have it enabled but it can be very confusing: depending on whether you're in a text field or not, in say a browser, ^W will mean delete word or close tab. And sure enough closing a tab will sometimes but not always focus the URL box of the previous tab.

There used to be an obscure internal GTK setting to properly separate control plane from command plane like on (then named) Mac OS X but IIRC it's long gone / hardcoded to only GTK on macOS.

EDIT: Found it, GTK up to 3 had proper <Primary> vs <Control>. In what I would consider to be a fatal regression, GTK 4 just aliases <Control> and <Primary>, leaving the apps to do the work.

https://gaphor.org/2022/12/10/gtk4-macos-keybindings/

Ctrl+a to carriage return the cursor seems work universally everywhere on a Mac. It even works on Microsoft products, incredible coming from the company that poorly reinvents everything and completely disrespects the default behaviors.

I always find this curious, is readline implemented at the hardware level or something? There’s just no effing way that was a priority ticket on Microsoft Teams given all the obnoxious weirdness of their chat text field.

And bizarrely, ctrl+k, ctrl+w, and ctrl+e are more seldom. Maybe 50-50 chance for those. But trusty ctrl+a is always there.

> because linux never picks the correct method

Because linux is not an operating system. A specific operating system will have some specific behaviour.

Another surprise was discovering that Ctrl-J adds a newline in Claude Code. I'm fairly certain this is a feature of the environment, not CC, but it works everywhere I've tried it. KDE Konsole on Debian.

       Oct   Dec   Hex   Char                        Oct   Dec   Hex   Char
       ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
       000   0     00    NUL '\0' (null character)   100   64    40    @
       001   1     01    SOH (start of heading)      101   65    41    A
       002   2     02    STX (start of text)         102   66    42    B
       003   3     03    ETX (end of text)           103   67    43    C
       004   4     04    EOT (end of transmission)   104   68    44    D
       005   5     05    ENQ (enquiry)               105   69    45    E
       006   6     06    ACK (acknowledge)           106   70    46    F
       007   7     07    BEL '\a' (bell)             107   71    47    G
       010   8     08    BS  '\b' (backspace)        110   72    48    H
       011   9     09    HT  '\t' (horizontal tab)   111   73    49    I
       012   10    0A    LF  '\n' (new line)         112   74    4A    J
       013   11    0B    VT  '\v' (vertical tab)     113   75    4B    K
       014   12    0C    FF  '\f' (form feed)        114   76    4C    L
       015   13    0D    CR  '\r' (carriage ret)     115   77    4D    M

A school teacher at a small charter school, teaching various levels of math and a few foreign languages. This person was pretty technically proficient - they used a linux to access the web, but it was set up to boot a browser in to full-screen kiosk mode, and they pretty much just searched webpages and printed things out sometimes, no email really.

The DOS was DRDOS 7.22, and it was very elaborately set up -- it boots from a CDROM or USB flash disk as a live disk. On the disk is every assignment, homework, or test for any of the various courses he taught, carefully organized. They are in WordPerfect 5.1 with a few graphics in another program, and a graphing ( as in X-Y cartesian plots ) program also, all ancient freeware DOS. The three programs come up instantly on boot in different terminate-and-stay-resident screens, that you switch to with a control-alt combo, very like switching terminals in text mode linux.

This meant he could take a CDROM to school, pop it in the horibly slow and ad-laden windows computer some government program had given the school for free, boot, disconnect the printer from the network to the constarnation of other teachers and plug in a USB cable, and print his assignments, and never bring back viruses. The students when they learned of this situation would search out old viruses on the web and try to infect everything.

But using windows and mac was pretty limited to a little bit of browsing, and occasionally going to a dedicated machine with the right program already set up, to enter grades and time sheets and etc.

Well, not really DOS, but company where I did migration (15+ years ago) from 4GL and AIX to Linux and Aubit 4GL did exactly that. They all used HyperTerminal (after me, putty) to connect and start all sorts of apps, think, SQL AND UI at the same time, terminal apps, with keyboard shortcuts that MUST be exactly the same, otherwise you would have mutiny.

They are sold a few years ago, new owner just needs a good (and huge) location in the city, if they continued, nothing would change for people working there. They saw Windows as something just for minesweeper and solitaire, nothing else.

Maybe the GP is friends with George RR Martin.

This is perhaps an indirect confirmation that The Winds of Winter is back on track.

I'm still using DOS to control a galvo-steered LASER animation system from 30 years ago. 133MHz Pentium, non-MMX, 16MB RAM, 16MB Voodoo3.

> Who the heck has been using DOS (!?) until "pretty recently"? On what machine?

Not "DOS" in the classical sense, but a good corporate travel agent will probably spend the majority of their day in Amadeus or Sabre on a terminal emulator app - and be much, MUCH faster than clicking around in web portals.