Comment by ak_111

> so that for example ctrl-a will always go to the beginning of a textbox no matter the application

And Control-W will always erase word no matter the application?

This is actually a major reason I use KDE: I can, with some effort, change keyboard shortcuts to avoid conflicting with terminal Control keys. It doesn't solve the textbox problem, though.

(I don't use Emacs bindings, but Control-W erase word came in the ‘new’ TTY driver in BSD2 in 1983 — predating Windows 1.0, incidentally — likely copying TOPS-20.)

There are projects like kinto that achieve very good results at making Linux behave like macOS on shortcuts (cmd instead of ctrl only when it makes sense, etc).

I’m not sure how they do it, i suspect it’s mostly a manual grind for configuring the most common shortcuts and apps, but there might be some idea there that can be reused for the eMacs setup.

On paper KDE's system is more elegant and practical than GNOME's. In practice the keyboard shortcut management via exporting and importing is rather unwieldy. Then again, if you want to go deep into setting up your shortcuts to something properly usable, it's a fair bit more convenient with KDE, where all your shortcuts are in a single place, than with GNOME, where you have to look in all the gconf categories and it's a right pain to find conflicts.

I'm not sure this is the reason or a big reason, but I think this is very difficult to do in Linux, sadly.

What makes Linux great is also its biggest handicap, in my opinion, when it comes to User Experience: the fragmentation of UI frameworks and libraries.

I imagine having this control between Qt, GTK and other UI libraries and electron-type-apps os difficult if not impossible.

As I thought: you can set a different shortcut for "Beginning of line" and it will work in Qt input fields but, sadly, not others. I don't know if this is the step you're on.

omg I found my people. Ctrl+A and Ctrl+E are so engraved into my muscle memory that it always takes a moment to readjust when using non Mac OSes. I didn't know Gnome also uses those as a KDE fan

This seemed like something relatively easy for chatgpt to handle. The response is a bit complicated compared to what it sounds like you are looking for (it's not from the kde settings gui), but still a two minute "fix".