Comment by fingerlocks
15 hours ago
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.
I have been using Linux / GNOME as my primary environment for the last 20 years, but at my current job, that was not an option, so I'm on macOS.
I tried for a week to get used to the unfamiliar key bindings for text input, but then I gave up—I'm a vim user after all!—and found a system setting to use the bindings I am more familiar with. This was picked up by many applications, but notably _not_ by the Microsoft suite, which appears to have the default macOS bindings hard coded...
To me Ctrl+A was always "Select All", and it worked reliably on every system I had (except once when at my office I had a computer with unix bindings and the administrator told me he can't change them so I only used my laptop).
It’s an OS level thing (well, OS + standard widget library). As long as the app is using a native macOS text field, the OS has (and has since I think the first versions of osx) support for basic emacs movement keys, no extra effort on the app developers part.