That's the developer perspective. As a user, macOS looks interesting due to the underlying UNIX, the consistent user interface and the high quality applications that are available. I've spend 200€ on Final Cut Pro X and it works very well. There'd have to be some really significant issues for me to switch.
Have they fixed the utterly inconsistent way of moving/selecting words/lines since Snow Leopard?
Back then, depending on application I think you'd have to use ctrl-shift, cmd-shift, alt-shift or fn-shift to select words or lines of text depending on which application you used.
And yes, this inconsistency included their own software.
And yes, this is an honest question, I don't know the answer. I left Mac behind around 2012 because of a number of such things that kept wasting my time and my focus, but I enjoyed other parts of the experience and would be happy to pay (or get someone else to pay) for a premium non-Windows experience.
- cmd-left/right/up/down jumps to the edges of the document (unless the app overrides this).
- fn- and ctrl- are not typically used when editing text. In particular, the fn key is specifically used to invoke keys that are only available the extended keyboards, like home, page up, and forward delete. (Extended keyboards don't have the fn key.) I think there was a point where ctrl- did the same thing same thing as opt- or cmd-, probably as a convenience to users coming from other platforms.
Every single modern app has honored this in native text widgets since the first Mac OS X, I believe.
If you remember it being inconsistent, it's possible that you were using apps that use non-Cocoa UI like GTK/Qt/X11 (and possibly Carbon too). It might have been an app from Microsoft or Adobe, who seem to use their own UI toolkits. Or you could have been using a terminal app or developer tool with custom keybindings that didn't conform to these conventions. (VSCode, Atom, and Sublime Text's default keybindings do conform to this, and in Terminal and iTerm, there is a setting you can turn on to make the opt- modifer also conform.)
It is 8 years ago, so it is hard to remember exactly, but I found something on my old blog:
> Appendix: The hopeless keyboard addicts guide to the Mac keyboard:
> I was about to make a table here, detailing how to get at least home/end and pageup/down in the most used programs. But then some programs even differ inside of the program (like, "home" and "end" are mapped to different key combos depending on if you are located in the address bar of you browser or in a text area. This is especially funny when you've almost finished some writing on a blog, a company intranet etc, you want to select one line of text to move it around, and you forget that the key combo that means mark to start of line in one application means go to previous page in the browser. This particular one has hit me twice.)
> Here are a few hints anyway:
> - ctrl+a go to start of line. Works in almost every program, including terminal, but doesn't work together with shift.
> - ctrl+e go to end of line. Works in almost every program, including terminal, but doesn't work together with shift.
> - cmd + arrows/fn + arrows - may or may not works for either home/end. Depends on mood of programmer, moon phase when program was written or some other, unknown parameter. If one doesn't work, try another, they rarely do anything really wrong except triggering the web browser back action.
I'll admit that I haven't written anything about selecting words, and I don't trust my memory to be perfect, but I am also not sure I misremember that part. If it was only home/end I think I could have dealt with it by using shift-up/down.
PS: I develop but not on macOS and not for iOS.