There are users from different operating systems having significantly different shortcut key bindings.
It is great to see gnome already added the gtk-key-theme to support emacs input shortcuts. However, the commonly used copy and paste shortcuts, window or application switching shortcuts and other shortcuts including application specific shortcuts still differ from OS to OS. Cross OS applications usually adapt their default shortcuts to shortcut style of the native OS, which usually means pick different one of ctrl or meta or command as the primary modifier key for most frequently used shortcuts.
These adaptions can be done at runtime, just like the dark or light theme switching. Can we have a global setting for the desired shortcut theme, so that all applications can detect and adapt their default key bindings automatically?
These keys only exist in GTK3, and have been removed in GTK4 because they do not work like you think they should.
No, that’s not how anything works.
Applications that support different operating systems should support different key shortcuts depending on the platform they are currently running on, to fit in with the interface guidelines of that platform. GNOME HIG mandates specific key shortcuts, macOS mandates their own, and so do the Windows guidelines. Applications are responsible for dealing with this aspect of their UI.
Anyway, if gnome supports multiple styles of shortcuts, applications should be able to detect and adapt. This would allow better user experience when users have to switch on multiple platforms.
There are some tools partly address the needs for different shortcut styles. The settings app allows customizing some shortcuts, dconf allows more customizations, xremap is be more powerful. But they can’t be perfect without each application’s own adaption.
It is very similar to the dark mode requirement. Eventually we need a single source of truth for such requirement to have the best user experience.
I know this is a nob-trivial effort. Do you have any suggestions if I or others hope to contribute the support?
With GTK3. Emacs input is not supported any more in GTK4, and even in GTK3 it was a curiosity and not actively supported.
GNOME does not support “multiple styles”: you’re thinking of GTK, and GTK does not support them either starting with GTK4.
At this point, I don’t think I understand what you’re asking.
Do you want to have GNOME applications using macOS key shortcuts while running in GNOME? That’s not something that is supported, or even remotely planned. It’s also not something that we are interested in.
If you’re asking for applications to use GNOME shortcuts while running under GNOME, macOS shortcuts while running under macOS, etc. then it’s something that needs to be done on a per-application basis.