Once again, as is occasionally the happens, I’ve stumbled across an Emacs user who discovered that some Emacs keybindings work in macOS. This user, sudeenhux, realized that he could navigate in the Apple Mail app with the normal Emacs bindings. He had no idea what was going on and took to reddit to ask what he had done to enable this. When reddit told him this was built in to macOS and worked with all macOS applications, he was overjoyed.
The thing is, of course, that what sudeenhux discovered is only half the story. As I’ve reported many times before—most recently here—macOS lets you configure your own bindings for its navigation commands. That would be a pain if you had to do it piecemeal but the way it works is that you put the bindings in a file and everything happens automatically. Even better, someone has already done the hard part and produced the file so all you have to do is download it and install it in the proper place. All the details are in the above link.
As a bonus, I recently got tired of not having Ctrl+Delete work in all macOS apps so I added an entry to enable it. That shows how easy it is to add your own bindings, assuming, of course, that macOS has a command that supports it.
I’m always surprised that so many people don’t know this so I like to remind everyone once in a while. Some of you may be tired of hearing about it but to those who don’t already know, it’s a revelation.