Most of those emacs shortcuts work in Cocoa text fields, including TextEdit, your location bar, file dialogs, etc... Some, like ^W, are missing though, but, likewise to .inputrc, they can be added back via:
~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict
Some people went overboard[0] with it, but hey, whatever floats your boat. At least it makes for some kind of example/demo/documentation for the thing.
As an aside, personal opinion: the separation of Control and Command on macOS is the one thing I love as it makes for a very consistent interface whether I'm in a terminal or in an application.
> the separation of Control and Command on macOS is the one thing I love
I became a reluctant Mac user (work gave me a Mac laptop).
Being able to use ^D, ^N and so on in this text edit box is very useful, especially on a laptop keyboard, and it's something I miss back in KDE. Does anyone know a way to bring the same feature to KDE, Firefox etc?
Last time I tried it was in the KDE 3 days and there were mappings that you could set up but it required so much tedious work, often per app.
the end result was terrible and inconsistent.
I’ve also explored the Ctrl/Cmd separation in GNOME/GTK3 but it’s deep into the code, guess what there’s actually a constant or two dedicated for that and it could magically work but they’re entirely unavailabe to configuration, probably pertain to some build time thing for macOS, gated by auto #define’d per platform values. Turns out nobody cares and it requires quite an involvement to get into the thing, build a proper patch, submit it, have it reviewed and accepted.
In the end I stuck for a while in tiled WM land (awesome, i3) with deft configuration, and minimal desktop apps that wouldn’t require such shortcuts, but you always end up needing a browser or something and things become leaky and inconsistent again. So I moved back to macOS.
As an aside, personal opinion: the separation of Control and Command on macOS is the one thing I love as it makes for a very consistent interface whether I'm in a terminal or in an application.
[0]: https://github.com/ttscoff/KeyBindings