The biggest problem so far I’ve had when switching from windows to a mac were the shortcut keys, and mostly the inconsistency thereof. It turns out there is a way to manipulate the keybindings for all cocoa apps, which should make them consistent across all good cocoa citizens. Firefox isn’t one of those citizens neither is firefox 3.0.
I uninstalled quicksilver because I couldn’t work out what it would do for me and didn’t want to spend time figuring it out either. This liberated my ctrl-space for visual studio. I remapped alt-insert to alt-i and that works for me. Then I brought some consistency in the way my keys behave across all cocoa apps.
I solved my problem with the shortcut keys by following the instructions that can be found in the following posts.
They talk about editing a file by hand and saving it, but for those that like a GUI there is one for it.
The GUI application: KeyBindingsEditor
The links with some instructions and background information.
http://blog.macromates.com/2005/key-bindings-for-switchers/
http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/cocoa-text.html
The last post lists a couple of predefined keybinding files like one for emacs
http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/KeyBindings/Emacs%20Esc%20Bindings.dict
or windows key bindings
http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/KeyBindings/Emacs%20Esc%20Bindings.dict
Guess which ones I took and it’s not emacs 
I actually just took a couple of keybindings. The ones that I use the most
/***** ARROWS *****/
“^\UF700″ = “moveToBeginningOfParagraph:”; /* C-up Move to beginning of paragraph */
“^\UF701″ = “moveToEndOfParagraph:”; /* C-down Move to end of paragraph */
“^$\UF700″ = “moveToBeginningOfParagraphAndModifySelection:”;
/* C-Shft-up Select to beginning of paragraph */
“^$\UF701″ = “moveToEndOfParagraphAndModifySelection:”;
/* C-Shft-down Select to end of paragraph */
“^\UF702″ = “moveWordLeft:”; /* C-left Move word left */
“^\UF703″ = “moveWordRight:”; /* C-right Move word right */
“$^\UF702″ = “moveWordLeftAndModifySelection:”;
/* C-Shft-left Select word left */
“$^\UF703″ = “moveWordRightAndModifySelection:”;
/* C-Shft-right Select word right */
/***** CTRL + LETTERS *****/
“^a” = “selectAll:”; /* C-a Select all */
“^x” = “cut:”; /* C-x Cut */
“^c” = “copy:”; /* C-c Copy */
“^v” = “paste:”; /* C-v Paste */
“^z” = “undo:”; /* C-z Undo */
“^y” = “redo:”; /* C-y Redo */
“^s” = “save:”; /* C-s Save */
“^S” = “saveAs:”; /* C-Shft-s Save as */
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