Took a few times of finding random text in my code to realize what was happening, and even longer to figure out how.
For a long time I thought that opening links in a new tab would sometimes take you instead to a random page on the internet.
I haven't figured out how to disable the X11 clipboard yet. If you find a way, please post it ;)
You could probably write a daemon to keep the primary selection empty. The `xsel` program would be a good place to start. I thought you could do it with `while true; do echo -n '' | xsel -n -i; done`, but it quits immediately if the input is empty so that would be constantly executing a new program. Still, I expect there's some trickery you could do with it, or you could look at how it's implemented and copy that.
(edit - or to eliminate a lot of the pain,
while true; do echo -n ' ' | xsel -n -i; done
So reinstalling the whole OS was higher up the troubleshooting chain than just trying it out from your wife's computer? Err...
If you've never done the equivalent, it's only because you haven't been around computers very long.
Dude, in twenty years with computers I have never re-installed an OS to fix a problem (obviously this is distinct from installing a new version of the OS which could legitimately have a fix for it). For me rebooting the computer is even a last act of desperation that I am ashamed to take.
But then I am a unix/Linux user. I grant you the possibility that this may somehow have been a rational act for MacOS, though if true I find that disappointing.
I think you are suggesting a non-causal solution. What exactly is this "it" you think I should have tired on my wife's computer? The character never appears in my normal mac usage. So despite the fact that I use her computer all the time, I never noticed it happening (though I'm sure it did) from her computer.
At the time, all you had to go on was that there was a probable misconfiguration somewhere in the deep, dark innards of MacOS, and the best way to handle that particular problem is to nuke it from orbit.
For example, you can press ctrl+a to go to the beginning of the line and ctrl+e to go to the end of the line. The "Meta" modifier can be accessed via alt+ctrl, so you can alt+ctrl+f to go forward a word, or alt+ctrl+b to go back a word. Any motion can be combined with shift to select the text.
These are especially useful with the laptop keyboards. Bonus points if you convert your caps lock key into an additional ctrl key: http://mkaz.com/archives/86/disable-caps-lock-on-mac-os-x/
He provides a custom DefaultKeyBinding.dict which adds more emacs keybindings to Cocoa text controls. I've been using it for years: http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/Site/KeyBindings/Emacs%20Es...
I also bind H to ^ and L to $ with
bind -m vi 'H: vi-first-print'
bind -m vi 'L: end-of-line'
(not OS X specific, but related)
The current Mac "Delete" key was inherited from the Apple IIgs ADB keyboard, and it stuck around.
I've also submitted it to bugreport.apple.com as bug # 8223684
But, yes, you are right, holding shift+any arrow key, while hitting backspace, inserts a $08 by the OS X IME. This does depend on what kind of dialog you are writing in (NSTextField, NSTextInput etc.), however, as not all of them accepts this input. You can't input a backspace character this way in Terminal.app, f.e.
