I tend to agree, but working out how to move a cursor around text, with various combinations of either character by character, or word by word, or to the beginning or end of the line, and either selecting or not selecting text, was pretty frustrating.
3) My keyboard has [fn][ctrl][alt][cmd][space][cmd][alt], there's no [option].
I always thought that the text shortcuts are intuitive and easy to remember. Shortcuts you are used to are always going to be easier to remember than new ones – that is always going to distort your view. I wouldn’t put to much weight on that.
You navigate text using the arrow keys on their own (characters and lines) or with one of two modifiers: Alt (words and paragraphs) and Command (lines and text fields). If you use no modifiers you are moving around one character (left, right) or line (up, down) at a time. Alt allows you to move from word to word (left, right) or paragraph to paragraph (up, down). Command navigates to the beginning and end of the line (left, right) or text field (up, down). As you can see there is a clear and straightforward hierarchy.
People are already used to using the arrow keys to navigate text. The modifier keys do nothing more than what they are supposed to do: The arrow keys still do similar stuff than before, it’s only slightly modified. This is an excellent example of picking awesome keyboard shortcuts.
You can add Shift to any of those combinations to select instead of just moving the cursor. Command-Left moves the cursor the the beginning of the line, Command-Shift-Left selects everything between the current position of the cursor and the beginning of the line.
Shift is used for selecting things everywhere, no matter the OS. OS X definitely picks the right modifier for selecting text and everything is still consistent with moving around in text. Anyone who knows how to move around in text can easily be taught how to select text: It’s exactly the same, only with Shift.
If you use Backspace and Delete (which is Fn-Backspace on keyboards without the Delete key) together with Alt or Command you can delete words or lines respectively (as you would expect).
Again, OS X remains consistent. Backspace and Delete work with exactly the same modifiers in exactly the same way as the arrow keys. This behavior is once again easy to teach.
This all seems crystal clear to me and I’m loving it very much. I think all the key combinations make intuitive sense.
I hope I could also explain why I think that OS X is so consistent and intuitive in this regard.
You do a nice job of explaining it, and I am grateful to you. Now that you lay it out it does seem a lot more consistent than I thought.
My only minor gripe (and this is cross OS, with many softwares and keyboards) is that it's harder for touch typists to use. Compare any shortcuts that require you to take your hands from the home keys with, eg, the shortcuts provided by Wordstar.
3) My keyboard has [fn][ctrl][alt][cmd][space][cmd][alt], there's no [option].