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> They even work in most native text editing fields in macOS and iOS.

Some of them work, e.g. C-a/C-e, which is nice. However, after hearing about that "Readline keybindings work everywhere in MacOS", I was quite disappointed when I finally bought a Mac and the more useful Emacs/Readline bindings like M-f/M-b/M-d were all missing. I'm still happy with my Mac overall, but I wish they went further in this regard.



There are conflicting systems in macOS at play here as a result of choosing the "Option" key as your "Meta" key. The basics of the Cocoa Emacs Keybindings (DefaultKeyBinding.dict) do allow for M-f/M-b/M-d to work as us Emacs users expect, however there is a conflict with the default US Keyboard Layout, which hijack these useful Option key sequences to allow for the easy input of letters with various diacritic markings. If you want to undo this, you can use a Keyboard Layout Editor like Ukelele[0] to make a custom layout that allows these key sequences to arrive unmolested at the Cocoa input system.

[0]: https://software.sil.org/ukelele/


Lol. Geez, we gotta do something about key sequences getting 'molested'...


I think that’s because the Meta key is the Option key on Macs which conflicts with some traditional keyboard shortcuts for other things in the OS.


For M-b and M-f, the equivalents are M-<left> and M-<right>




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