Re: Key bindings proposal

["Eric M. Ludlam" <eric@siege-engine.com>]

On 07/27/2010 06:32 AM, Stefan Monnier wrote:
>> If Emacs did take key binding customization seriously, it would have
>> >  provided a whole bunch of*declarative*  methods for specifying key
>> >  bindings, along with rules for how they override each other or not
>> >  override, as the need may be.
> I understand what you want.  But, I'm not 100% sure what a good solution
> would look like, and I'm even less clear on how we could get to such
> a solution starting from Emacs's current system.
>
> The main problem is not whether the method is declarative or not, but
> rather the problem is to make intentions clear.
>
> The issue with "intentions" is typically along the lines of "do you want
> to bind `foo' to C-x C-x or do you want to bind it to the C-x key within
> the main prefix keymap, or do you want to bind it to the repetition of
> the key-sequence to which this main keymap is bound, or maybe only to
> the repetition of just the last key in this key-sequence, or maybe to
> the repetition of C-"the key above my "alt" key, or maybe you want to
> bind it to whichever key `foobar' is bound in such-and-such-mode, ..."

Hi,

While it may not cover the gamut of possible keybinding remapping, one 
way to express intention is to make all the commands that get bound into 
global maps be overridable in some way.  Some commands like 
beginning/end of line have this feature already.  Modes of all sorts 
would then override the behavior they want to change instead of binding 
their custom functions to keys.

This would then make it much easier to just move all the Emacs core 
commands around while allowing the modes to follow easily.

Using something like mode-local.el is one way to do this in a 
declarative way which I used extensively in CEDET.

Eric