commandline and vim have easily got the most powerful, yet the most rage-inducing key mappings – ever.
The worst, and most easily rectifiable aspect is the way command pairs (eg move back/forward a word) require two totally separate commands (esc + b/esc + f) instead of having one command + a generic 'reverse' meta key.
In the future I hope someone has the balls to do away with this legacy tripe and popularise some more Donald-Normanesque keyboard shortcuts.
I'm not sure if you're just trolling, but I don't understand your complaints at all. What would your "Donald-Normanesque keyboard shortcuts" even look like? In Windows the arrow keys act pretty similar, don't they? left-arrow, right-arrow for moving by character, Ctrl-left-arrow, Ctrl-right-arrow for moving by word. Windows is about as Donald-Normanesque as you can get...
The bash shortcuts are from readline, which (in this case, but by default?) are the same as Emacs. C-f,C-b for moving by character, M-f,M-b for moving by word. C-n,C-p for next and previous line. I think there's a vi switch for readline which would allow you to have vi style shortcuts in bash. This is nice, because it means you have one set of keyboard shortcuts in your editor and shell. Emacs users in OS X get this in any text box (at least any that supports the same defaults as the system, I'm spitting at you MS Outlook/Entourage). I'm sure you could set something up in other windows systems, like GNOME or KDE.
Sure the keyboard shortcuts might be cryptic, but any keyboard shortcuts will be. Don't slag something just because you don't know the history and background behind the choices.
The worst, and most easily rectifiable aspect is the way command pairs (eg move back/forward a word) require two totally separate commands (esc + b/esc + f) instead of having one command + a generic 'reverse' meta key.
In the future I hope someone has the balls to do away with this legacy tripe and popularise some more Donald-Normanesque keyboard shortcuts.