Interesting. I actually love the Command key. I see it as a Control key for GUI operations, leaving my actual Control key free for doing things in my Terminal. This is actually a big sticking point when it comes to trying to work on Linux workstations like we have at work -- GUI and console stuff end up munged under the same modifier key (and this is harder to change than you'd think, even with a lot of xmodmap work).
That said, I've also ditched my Caps Lock key entirely and turned it into a second Control key. Control-A has never seemed difficult to me, at least with this arrangement, but I'm not a home row typist (or an Emacs user -- I just use the Emacs bindings in text boxes and terminals).
Otherwise this more or less mirrors my experience, although mine was ~7 years ago (so the Linux desktop environment was even less mature at the time). I haven't found a need to shop around for as many alternative applications. In particular, you can have Terminal.app when you pry it from my cold dead hands.
I never forget that time when I was ssh-ed on some machine and was doing something very urgent, and wanted to copy some text from the terminal to text editor (it was an Ubuntu machine) and accidentally pressed control-c and killed the session. I could've killed someone.
IMO, the Command key is one of the best features of a Mac.
Another vote for "the Command key" (specifically, a modifier key distinct from the Control key on which to put the "more modern" shortcuts like copy, paste, kill window).
But then I was on text-mode Linux (and before that, text-mode Unix) for many years. I would understand if someone used to Windows did not like it.
I have the opposite problem. There's one command - I think it's probably <C-w> (split screens in Vim) that I always hit every time I'm using a Mac, and it inevitably closes my entire terminal.
The nice thing about Linux is that I can at least remap these keybindings. On OS X, it's literally impossible to do a perfect remapping of the keys (trust me. I've tried.)
Hopefully I've saved recently (or run the process inside GNU screen....).
I agree with your general point. I dislike most things about mac but their extra keys do make sense.
But control-c should not kill your session, only the currently running process. Control-d is what kills sessions. If you have no current foreground process the shell just starts a new input line. Still could be real bad obviously if a process is killed.
You're right. It didn't kill the session, it killed the process (Nutch (a search engine) was at its last stages of computing PageRank for tens of thousands of pages, which takes quite a while).
Thing is that you can't blame the keyboard for a PEBCAK. We all encounter that "never forget" moments at some point. Having a Command key is a moot point as the whole purpose of power user tools is this: having the power, and the consequences, at the finger tips. You know: "power is nothing without control", "with great power comes great responsibility", etc - stuff like this.
Don't get me wrong, I am not against specific boundaries for keeping people from doing potentially unwanted actions. But at some point, all the technical solutions to human errors are like sudo.
I watch co-workers struggle all day with their windows-based terminals logged into Linux machines. Copy is something like shift+insert or they have to go to edit > copy. So painful
Except for the fact that shift + insert is for pasting. ctrl + insert is for copy. Did not change till the old DOS days. Still works today, and even more, it works in my Konsole terminal emulator. There's nothing painful about that. Once you get it, it's like riding a bicycle.
Even more, selecting text for copy, then clicking a mouse button for paste is a pretty much standard workflow. putty uses the right click for paste, while Konsole / Gnome Terminal / etc. use the middle click for that. Don't know about other Windows terminal emulators though. The other emulators that I tried pretty much had the same underwhelming behavior as cmd.exe.
I use Super for GUI stuff on Linux (via xmonad, but any window manager will do). X11 also supports the Hyper modifier if you need another. I never found it easy to use the Option key, which seems to be the de facto standard substitute for Meta on Apple keyboards.
Yeah, I've managed to get a Linux box to recognize the Command key as super when I plug in an Apple keyboard. Some apps seems to look for actual scancodes, though, rather than for what X11 tells them the mappings should be.
My experience was pretty hit or miss, and mostly I ended up with an mismash of semi-random keybindings which is sort of the opposite of what I was shooting for. On the Mac developers have done a remarkably good job of adhering to a consistent set of shortcuts (down to things like Command-, for preferences).
The other issue is that most apps don't make it straightforward to bulk re-assign keybindings from Control to Super, and last I checked it was impossible to turn off menu accelerators for Gtk+ based apps (e.g., Alt+F to bring up the file menu in Firefox).
Most of the time what I want is to map Command->Super and Option->Meta, and have Super replace Control in all GUI app keyboard shortcuts leaving Control available for command-line apps, in general.
That said, I've also ditched my Caps Lock key entirely and turned it into a second Control key. Control-A has never seemed difficult to me, at least with this arrangement, but I'm not a home row typist (or an Emacs user -- I just use the Emacs bindings in text boxes and terminals).
Otherwise this more or less mirrors my experience, although mine was ~7 years ago (so the Linux desktop environment was even less mature at the time). I haven't found a need to shop around for as many alternative applications. In particular, you can have Terminal.app when you pry it from my cold dead hands.