Re: Suggested experimental test

[Gregory Heytings <gregory@heytings.org>]

>
> So is the plan to readd keybindings center-FOO?
>

There is no clear predefined plan, just some ideas I'm currently 
experimenting with.

>
> What about C-o -- that seems to be hitting the trash can, for whatever 
> reason.  Some of these bindings (C-o for example) have existed for 40 
> years in Emacs (M-o M-s was once upon a time on M-s).
>
> There was alot of thought put into it back then, and the intent was to 
> make it easy to write code and text.  That was the main intent of Emacs, 
> and main design decisions in the bindings.  These "freeing up 
> keybindings" initiatives make it harder for people to use Emacs, not 
> easier.
>

C-o is not at all "hitting the trash can", at the moment there is nothing 
more than a proposal to conduct an experiment to make a (small?) change to 
its meaning.

Even among the C-LETTER and M-LETTER keys, there are quite a few whose 
meaning have changed during the last 40 years.  I know at least of: C-h, 
C-l, M-g, M-j, M-n, M-o, M-p, M-r and M-s.  That's 9 keys out of 52.

C-o was described as follows in the 1985 Emacs manual: "When you want to 
insert a new line of text before an existing line, you can do it by typing 
the new line of text, followed by RET.  However, it may be easier to see 
what you are doing if you first make a blank line and then insert the 
desired text into it.  This is easy to do using the key C-o, which inserts 
a newline after point but leaves point in front of the newline.  After 
C-o, type the text for the new line. C-o F O O has the same effect as F O 
O RET, except for the final location of point."  It seems clear that C-o 
was thought as a convenience command, not as an essential editing command.

C-o is, by the way, not even mentioned in the tutorial.

Emacs evolves very conservatively, and if at some point it becomes clear 
that some key binding is not useful for 99.9% of its users, there is no 
reason to keep it as is just because 40 years ago, under very different 
circumstances, it was considered convenient or useful.  I'd say that Emacs 
is a bit like the C programming language, which evolves as conservatively 
as (or perhaps even more conservatively than) Emacs.  Just because a 
function was considered useful and was included in the standard library 30 
years ago does not mean that it should forever remain in the standard 
library.