It's easy to forget that this little beast is all pervasive and can be customised so much. Every time I set up a new Mac, I feel happy it is here, but scared that one day it will just stop working. The perils of closed source, I guess.
For a while I was keenly interested in replacing the underlying text model with my own class, to support some weird stuff I wanted to do. It seemed like it would be straightforward, given the MVC structure, but the documentation confused me and I never quite figured it out. It didn't seem to be something Apple expected anyone to do.
One of the first things I set up on a new Mac is option-f to move-word-forward and option-b to backward. This is so useful that I am doomed to typing ƒ on every other Mac I use temporarily
Do you also update your shell and emacs keybindings to match? Or do you use option as meta in emacs to start with, and forego all the native option chords?
I don't know what it is about it, but having came from Win32 and going to Cocoa (in 2008 or so), it just felt like an amazingly well engineered set of API's. Everything was so fancy and elegant, while Windows felt like hack on top of hack.
If the state of current (10/11) Windows UI and UX is any indicator it must have gotten much worse since 2008. I would never have done anything that shows a GUI on Windows hadn't I had access to Qt to absolve me from that hell.
I was shocked and delighted to find that, after pairing a Bluetooth keyboard to my iPhone, the default emacs-lite Cocoa keybindings work there too. C-a to beginning of line, C-e to end, etc.
Am i just missing something or do the “command” shortcuts don’t work? Is there an option to enable?
Being able to quickly type text via a real keyboard is quite neat (except for C-Spc switching the input method, turns out I hit that quite a lot), but having to get back to the phone in order to cut/copy/paste is quite frustrating.
Any idea how to fix keyboard input switching, which doesn't respect each app's language? There is an option to keep each app's text input source, but it works only when an app has a text input field focused. It's my only serious issue with macOS for 17 years now.
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[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 26.3 ms ] thread"^w" = (deleteWordBackward:);
Now imagine the experience porting a NeXTSTEP app into MFC back in the the Windows 98 glory days.
Being able to quickly type text via a real keyboard is quite neat (except for C-Spc switching the input method, turns out I hit that quite a lot), but having to get back to the phone in order to cut/copy/paste is quite frustrating.