Re: Default Emacs keybindings

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

On Mon, May 03, 2004 at 12:32:57PM +0200, Lars Hansen wrote:
> In my dreams Emacs comes with two ore more keybinding schemes that one 
> can choose in the option menu. Moreover, they are easy to modify so you 
> can create your own one.
> 
> Do you agree with me that this would be good?
> What are the problems in doing it?

Well it's not like there's just a big list of bindings somewhere that can be
switched, emacs it has many interacting components, each of which makes some
assumptions about how things work -- and lots of external add-on packages
that do the same.

Some of the assumptions are obvious, e.g., code that does something with
ctl-x-map obviously assumes that C-x is a prefix binding, but others are less
so, e.g., when a package binds `C-c n' to move forward in some way, it's
building on a common assumption that n/p are used for vertical forward-back.

Morever, if you're attempting to emulate another existing standard, you run
into the problem that different interfaces simply have different
functionality and divide up the problems with different granularity.  E.g.,
emacs has C-s, C-r, etc., but windows has
C-f-and-check-a-button-in-a-dialogue-box.  How on earth do you reconcile
those?

I think that there are probably limited spaces where you could do something
easily, but that whole-sale re-theming of keybindings is ... hard.

-Miles
-- 
We live, as we dream -- alone....