OS X doesn’t have some features you would like it to have or you need. Looking at the features you are missing it doesn’t seem like they are central for most users. If a feature is not there you simply can’t use the OS. That’s fair enough. It just doesn’t seem like that’s really a problem OS X has.
Especially when you are coming from a different background it also can be hard to understand when an OS is doing something differently. This has nothing to do with it being better or worse, it’s just different.
Alt-Arrows will move you from word to word in Terminal (and also in every other text field), Ctrl-A and Ctrl-E will move you to the beginning and end of the line. That second set of shortcuts sucks because it isn’t consistent with the whole rest of the OS where Cmd-Arrows will move you to the beginning and end of lines and texts (depending on the direction of arrow you pick). As I said, those shortcuts work in every text field and you can mix them up with Backspace or Shift to delete or select whole words or lines. Many other vi keybindings work wherever you encounter text in OS X.
Shift-Cmd-G will allow you to type a path in Finder, just like in Terminal Tab autocompletes.
The green zoom button sucks and Apple should remove it. It is not supposed to maximize (so those 99% of all apps were doing it right), it usually tries to remove scrollbars (i.e. it grows or shrinks the window until there is no more space or until there are no more scrollbars). Some apps inconsistently treat it like a maximize button. Lion introduced fullscreen apps and the new fullscreen button should be treated as an equivalent (more or less) to Windows’ maximize button.
Alt-Arrows - is that a Lion thing? Opening up a stock iterm, and hitting...
hrm... well "alt" is above the 'option' label, so I'm not sure how to invoke that. option arrows don't move by word. fn+option (which I'd assume give me 'alt' mode) doesn't work. What's the magic invocation to make that happen? Or is it Lion only? (snow leopard here).
I’m sorry, the German keyboard confused me – there the option key is labeled alt. You can replace every Alt in my comment with Option.
I’m not sure whether that’s new (I think other shortcuts for moving from word to word were also already commented on around here) but when I fire up Terminal in Lion I can move from word to word by pressing Option-Arrow-left or Option-Arrow-right.
Hrm. Doesn't work here (US snow leopard MBP early 2011), and I'm pretty sure it's not worked on earlier versions.
Some other comments indicated "esc/b" and "esc/f", and those seem to work, but are horribly unintuitive and difficult to type. Will need to map them. I've lived X years without that ability, so another few minutes won't hurt :)
iTerm != Terminal. The alt-arrows works in Lion's Terminal; I just checked (although I use iTerm, where it doesn't work). iTerm appears to be the only app that doesn't respond to ctrl/alt-arrows. I use them quite frequently, and it always trips me up that iTerm works differently than essentially every other app.
That's because alt-arrow isn't a ANSI control sequence. What should it map to? You can see what your terminal is sending with this command:
stty -icanon -echo; od -c
Hit your key sequence then hit return a bunch of times until the line comes out. You'll see some sort of ESC sequence.
When done, control-c then type "stty sane" (it will not echo).
For iTerm I get "\e[1;9D". Terminal, interestingly is giving me "\e\eD". When I turn off my "Use option as meta key" preference in Terminal it gives me "\eD". Which is the same as plain left arrow.
Also, neither of those escape sequences does anything in bash for me.
You're right, in that they're not the same - I use the terms interchangeably sometimes and shouldn't. That said, my snow leaopard Terminal doesn't have those keystrokes working either. :/
I typically use iterm2 now, and I mapped option/left and option/right to ESC-b and ESC-f, and all is well for me. Hope that helps someone else.
if in terminal options you select "use option as meta key" [1], then option-b and option-f move forward / backward on words as normal in bash. You can also remap caps-local to control.
OS X doesn’t have some features you would like it to have or you need. Looking at the features you are missing it doesn’t seem like they are central for most users. If a feature is not there you simply can’t use the OS. That’s fair enough. It just doesn’t seem like that’s really a problem OS X has.
Especially when you are coming from a different background it also can be hard to understand when an OS is doing something differently. This has nothing to do with it being better or worse, it’s just different.
Alt-Arrows will move you from word to word in Terminal (and also in every other text field), Ctrl-A and Ctrl-E will move you to the beginning and end of the line. That second set of shortcuts sucks because it isn’t consistent with the whole rest of the OS where Cmd-Arrows will move you to the beginning and end of lines and texts (depending on the direction of arrow you pick). As I said, those shortcuts work in every text field and you can mix them up with Backspace or Shift to delete or select whole words or lines. Many other vi keybindings work wherever you encounter text in OS X.
Shift-Cmd-G will allow you to type a path in Finder, just like in Terminal Tab autocompletes.
The green zoom button sucks and Apple should remove it. It is not supposed to maximize (so those 99% of all apps were doing it right), it usually tries to remove scrollbars (i.e. it grows or shrinks the window until there is no more space or until there are no more scrollbars). Some apps inconsistently treat it like a maximize button. Lion introduced fullscreen apps and the new fullscreen button should be treated as an equivalent (more or less) to Windows’ maximize button.
Lion allows you to resize windows from all sides.