Last August, I gave up my four-year-old Linux T590 Thinkpad for a MacBook Pro. They’re different, and in some aspects, it’s been a difficult journey because MacOS is not Linux. In other ways (apps, audio, Bluetooth, etc.), MacOS has been fantastic.
The hardest thing to get used to is the keyboard shortcuts. I use keyboard shortcuts extensively, and they’re quite similar between Windows and Gnome Desktop. Not so with MacOS. MacOS is not Gnome, and it’s not Windows either.
Shortcuts that I still get wrong, six months later, and so I’m still learning.
- I hit CMD-Home, expecting to go to the top of the web browser window, or the top of a document.
- I hit CMD-up-arrow to go to the beginning of the line, and does something else. On Windows/Gnome, CTRL-up-arrow does what I expect. On Mac, it’s CONTROL-A, and CONTROL-E to move to the end of the line, just like with zsh and bash (by default), so I can accept that.
- F2 in the Finder doesn’t rename files. Apparently, the Return key does this instead. I can get used to that.
- In PyCharm, I still don’t know how to set and jump to bookmarks.
Mac doesn’t have window-snapping like Gnome or Windows, so I use Rectangle to remedy that. Although the keyboard shortcuts are different, I’ve gotten used to them.
Now that I use Mac during the workday, I’m used to starting apps with COMMAND-space. When I use our at-home Windows computer or my Linux computer, it takes me a few seconds to adjust to the different shortcut keys — just hit the windows key, no space bar needed.
The differences under-the-hood are far more striking than the keyboard-shortcut differences, but that’s a topic for another day.