In macOS it is not entirely clear to me what category of things the cmd key is for. On one hand it's used for keyboard shortcuts related to window management and the system, but on the other hand it's also used to issue commands to the application itself.

In i3 you assign a $mod key, which then always and exclusively used for 'system and window management'. Opening, closing, moving and resizing windows, switching workspaces and showing toolbars is all done with some key combination that starts with $mod.

Since reading and writing the clipboard is done by the application, in my brain it should not involve $mod. So I use ctrl+c and ctrl+v for all applications. The one exception is the terminal, in which ctrl+c terminates programs. So there I use ctrl+shift+c. I also unified the register vim yanks to with the system clipboard, so for me most copying and pasting that happens in the terminal is done via `y` (yank) and `p` (paste).

A more straight answer to your question is: yes, you can remap everything to bits. You can modify what keypress each keycode should trigger, so there is really no limit to what you can do there.

I'm with you, I find the meta key on mac messy. I personally change ctrl+shift+c and ctrl+shift+v to ctrl+c and ctrl+v in my terminal emulator so that it's consistent accross the board. This way it's clear: * meta key: my windows manager shortcuts * ctrl: app specific shortcuts

Cmd isn't really a meta key, though. It's just the equivalent of Control on Windows; there's no equivalent of a Windows key on macOS. That said, it's not quite necessary due to the decoupling of app windows and app open/close state.

Personally I find Apple's approach to key commands far and away the most well thought out and intuitive.

Get your keyboard setup as close as you can with whatever tools seem comfortable (eg gnome settings) and then dump the layout to an XKB file.

Now you can make the tweaks you need, and load them automatically next time with a call to xkb in your .xsession.

Linux and GNU and Xorg et al may be heterogenous and weird, but the joy of an open system is that if you want to take it apart and tweak it, you can.

Surely someone has already posted a solution on GitHub somewhere...

I'm trying to work through this lately and finding it hard: findings so far — https://wincent.com/wiki/Modifier_keys

Biggest hurdle is finding a clean way to do application-specific overrides, because even if you can get the general case working right, there is a lot of per-app variation.

I use XMonad and it has some ability to reconfigure such things. Not sure what the general solution is.

No, in the general case it is infuriatingly impossible