It's just a matter of practice in the end.
I had the same issue when I first started using a Mac decades ago (coming from being a Linux and Windows user), would get confused with Cmd and default to Ctrl, not understanding how to use diacritics, etc. A few weeks to a couple of months later and it was fine.
Nowadays I very much miss macOS diacritics shortcuts when using Windows, I only have a Windows PC for games with a Swedish/English keyboard but need to write in Portuguese sometimes, I have no idea how to use diacritics on Win11 while my keyboard is set to English, and much prefer the macOS way with Option + [N | E | I | C] (for ˜, ´, ˆ, ç) using any keyboard language, it just works. On Windows I need to change the whole keyboard language to be able to access diacritics easily, no shortcuts such as those.
Yea, having trained my muscle memory for at least 10 years on macs, my daily driver desktop is finally a modern Linux distro, and I'm having the most trouble with un-learning the ⌘ shortcuts. On Linux, sometimes "copy/paste" is CTRL-C/V, sometimes it's SHIFT-CTRL-C/V (meaning I need to position my pinky AND ring finger like I'm playing guitar or something). In terminals it's never CTRL-C/V, and once in a while there is an application where it's something bonkers. I kind of miss the universal ⌘ shortcuts that the entire macOS system and all 3rd party apps followed.
i'd suggest trying out toshy... it's a game changer for linux. you get almost all of the mac keyboard shortcuts working out of the box. there's a few rough edges sometimes but generally it feels like you're using a mac wrt shortcuts. even stuff like diacritics and textbox emacs shortcuts work if you want.
I distinctly remember using Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator way back to replicate Mac way of entering some typographically correct punctuation on top of Polish layout. You could make your own custom layout as well.
However, when I still used Windows 11, I remember there being a variant of US keyboard layout built into the system that included Mac-like way of entering international diacritics. I no longer have access to a machine with Windows, but a quick Google search suggests United States – International might be what you're looking for.
I always use this, maybe it'll help you: https://andrewdunning.ca/Mac-Keyboard-Layouts-for-Windows/
It's definitely a matter of what you're familiar with. As a Linux user I'm able to use the "Compose Character" key (I map the right-hand Ctrl key to it) and then use that to write diacritics just as I used to in my university computer lab in the '90s on DEC VT220 terminals!
It's quite a good system: you press compose-character and then two letters to be combined. E.g. CC/o/" gives ö and CC/a/o gives å and so on. If you don't know the exact combination, you can usually guess within one or two attempts e.g. just now trying to get ç I guessed CC/c/s (š) and then CC/c/c (č) before getting it right with CC/c/,
Apropos of Swedish keyboards, though, when a Mac is inflicted on me, the horrible contortions necessary to get all the usual programming bracket symbols ({[]}) are infuriating. They're a lot less annoying on a Swedish PC keyboard.
I used a Mac for a long time, but since Polish uses diacritics heavily, the default position of Option was just terrible for touch typing. I have always simply swapped Option and Command because of that. That was always there in the system's keyboard settings, so no extra tools were needed.
It was only when I moved to overriding CapsLock that I installed Karabiner.
That's not too different from macOS's approach, instead of compose-character you learn the shortcuts for composing with the diacritics or special characters. After I learnt them it has always been quite efficient, I can write in Swedish or Portuguese without thinking.
Just curious why compose-character combo for å is a/o though, it would make more sense to me to be a/a.
> Apropos of Swedish keyboards, though, when a Mac is inflicted on me, the horrible contortions necessary to get all the usual programming bracket symbols ({[]}) are infuriating.
Absolutely agree, I never use the Swedish software layout even on keyboards which are physically using a Swedish layout, it's maddening finding the {[]}-_+=@ chars...
> it would make more sense to me to be a/a
Yep, but I think it's intended to be a visual mnemonic. å looks like a tiny 'o' over the top of an 'a' even though that's not the letter combination it originated with.
> it's maddening finding the {[]}-_+=@ chars...
The series of RSI inducing vulcan neck pinches required to write C-like languages on a Nordic Mac layout drives me a bit mad, but I do have it in my body memory now when needs must!
I toy with the idea of designing my own 40%-ish keyboard just so I only have myself to blame for bad layout :)