alt Hacker NewsI love that on macOS all in-app shortcuts are consistently Command+Something, like Q for Quit, W to close a window, and Control is usually for system-wide shortcuts, and Shift/Alt/Option is exactly what it says on the tin: modifiers for alternative behavior. You usually won't see Alt/Option on its own for any shortcut..
..while Windows is all over the place. Like why the heck is Alt+F4 used for quitting an app?? What does 4 stand for here? Death in Japanese and Chinese!?
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> I love that on macOS all in-app shortcuts are consistently Command+Something, like Q for Quit, W to close a window
Yeah consistency is great, similarly cmd+t closes a tab, wait cmd+w closes a tab not a window. and cmd+w in vlc does not close vlc, cmd+w in finder does close the window.
CUA is a union of Mac like mnemonic command keys on Ctrl plus another set (from IBM/Motif perhaps) that use shift+insert,delete etc.
Alt+F4 through Alt+F9 are for Window Menu operations, like minimize, max. etc. Some besides Alt+F4:Close still work on older window managers, I remember SGI supported all of them.
Newer ones tend to hide or even disable the whole menu! Even Windows as it is further lobotomized.
Ctrl-W will close your window on Windows and end the program if it’s the only window open.
This is so hilariously wrong.
Apple commands are not always Command+Something. Go ahead, try to reopen the last closed tab on anything you're using, with the keyboard. Whooops, you pressed three keys. Also try to take a partial screen shot or record the screen. Hey, buddy, what the heck? Why did you press 4 and 5? What do 4 and 5 even mean?
It's [Alt]+[F4] because before being translated to a GUI setting where [Alt] modifiers denoted things that were the same across all applications, or at least 'system key' events, it was actually plain [F4] to 'save and exit'. This was notably the case in some PC-DOS text editors.
Common User Access (CUA) in 1987 came from the world of IBM mainframes to IBM-involved microcomputer operating systems like PC-DOS and OS/2, and was the idea that there would be a common set of function keys across all 'panels' in Systems Application Architecture (SAA) applications.
Fun fact: CUA didn't originally define [F4] with its current meaning, and it was actually [F3] to exit, after [F1] for help and [F2] for toggling between two sets of function key bindings. But notice how [F5] was refresh all along.
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