New macbook pro. Finally switching to a new version of Logic Audio after something like 12 years of using an old out-of-date Windows version.

Messing with the idea of changing my key configurations though, because my life for the forseeable future is going to be spent going back and forth between mac and windows, and I'm already used to windows. Mainly the behaviors I want to fix are home, end, ctrl-left, ctrl-right, and then expand from there.

I've been using a bunch of different guides on the web which all seem to say I need to create a file called DefaultKeyBinding.dict in the /Library/KeyBindings/ folder off the root directory. I've done this but it's not paying attention to the changes I'm making. It's like it doesn't see the file at all.

I thought I'd found the problem when I zoomed in really far and peered really closely and noticed that TextEdit was using "smart quotes" on the file, so I fixed those, but still nothing.

First attempt at the file attached. What's wrong with it?

Hah, figured it out.

The issue is that everyone said "Oh it's in ~/Library" without explaining where the fuck that is. I'm supposed to glean from magic that "~/" means the root of the user profile folder rather than the root of the hard disk.

I was putting it in the wrong folder.

Funny thing is, the first place I looked for a "Lbrary" folder had been the user folder and I didn't see one. I had to do swizzlestick-G and type in the ~/Library to find it.

Example:

I say new finder window.
I pick "Desktop" from the favorites.
There's my desktop folder.
I wanna go one-level-up from that to see what's in my user folder.
I say View, show Path Bar.
Path bar shows me that I'm in:
Macintosh HD, Users, TonyFabris, Desktiop
I doubleclick on "TonyFabris" in the path bar and it moves me up one level to TonyFabris folder.

I DO NOT see "Library" there. That's where I was looking for it in the first place. So I go to the root directory and I see "Library" there so I assume that's the one they meant.

But later I press Shift-Swizzlestick-G and it opens up "go to folder" and I type "~/library" and it opens up a library folder full of interesting and useful stuff.

But the path bar says Macintosh HD, Users, TonyFabris, Libraray.

Dude I was just looking for library there. That's the first place I looked. I guess it must be a hidden folder.

I totally understand the need for OS's to have hidden folders. But the ten billion guides I found which, by their very nature, were all geared towards Windows users switching to mac, which told me to put this file in the "Library" folder, could have taken into account their audience and y'know, maybe mentioned that the folder was hidden and that this "~/" notation was shorthand for the user folder.

And if it was so important to make /users/username/Library a hidden folder, then why isn't /Library a hidden folder?

Open Finder, Command-N for a new window if needed, Shift-Command-H, then Command-J. Put a check in Show Library Folder.

Cool! so that's the equivalent of the folder options screen in windows. Is that applicable to all places where I might open the Finder, or just that one place?

Because it used to not be hidden and it was there and visible when ever people opened their home directories. And when people went in and decided to to "have a tidy up" bad things happened.

People stumble on /Library a fair bit less and Apple took the different approach of locking it down through permissions (users need to be able to write to ~/Library regularly, /Library not so much).

And I guess people clear about ~ because it has meant the user's home directory in Unixy shells since about the beginning of time

The shift-cmd-h was to make sure you were your home directory in Finder. That show library option only appears when you open that options pane in the home directory.

And yes it should in theory make the ~/Library folder visible wherever you access it from, but no doubt there is some old ball app out there where it doesn't

That all makes perfect sense. I was very frustrated about it for a day or two though.

It had been so long since I'd been in a Unix shell that I must have forgotten what ~/ meant.

Currently, I'm happy that I finally got the text editing commands working to my liking, and I no longer pull my hair out when trying to navigate around a text file or a forum post. Now that I've gotten the DefaultKeyBinding.dict working, I've expanded it significantly, it's now modifying more than a dozen different common text-editing keystrokes to make them behave like Windows.

Not yet sure if DefaultKeyBinding.dict is going to mess up Logic Audio's keyboard commands and shortcuts. Many of them are the same keystrokes. Logic has its own key remapping features built in, too, so it might get complicated.

I ran into the keyboard differences with my first Mac too. Went down the same route too. But eventually ripped out the changes.

You can only read so many native Mac instructions that say use Option+somekey only to remember too late that your fiddling has mapped Option to some other key. My advice, start learning the new muscle memory.