Unless you learnt to type using a Mac you probably thought W-T-F the first time you tried to type something in one of them.
Again, Linux and Windows behave almost the same way, but some geniuses at Apple decided to go creative, and this time not in the nice way. To name a few:
* There's a Ctrl key, but doesn't work as you'd expect.
* There's CMD key that you don't know what's for.
* You have the F keys but they don't work as you'd expect either.
* You have end/beginning of line, PageUp and and PageDown keys, but guess what? You bet your ass they don't work as you'd expect.
* If you want to select words in a line instead of just letters, the key combination is Alt + Shift instead of Ctrl + Shift.
Not enough? Then check this out: even though you can solve some of these
features editing dark configuration files somewhere in your hard drive the changes are
NOT consistent through all your applications. Some of them follow that new configuration file, like TextMate, some others don't, like Firefox or the console.
Apparently it has to do with being a Cocoa application, but I'm going to play here the "
I'm a dumb user, don't give a shit about your geeky stuff" card and say: "I don't give a shit about your geeky stuff, all I want is that my applications behave consistently".
The reason for this odd behaviour on Macs? I have no idea. What I think is that this
feature is not an advantage (like a nice innovation as, let's say, the iPhone interface), just a different way of doing things, a deviation from the standard. Why keep using it? Remember that
defaults are arguably the most important design decisions you'll ever make as a software developer.