Re: Binding M-n and M-p to forward-paragraph and backward-paragraphrespectively

[PJ Weisberg <pj@irregularexpressions.net>]

On 4/9/11, Davis Herring <herring@lanl.gov> wrote:
>> The last go-round about binding some (function) key by default clearly
>> demonstrated this: The discussion had not even finished, and no
>> decision had yet been reached, before some were sending in posts
>> that indicated that they understood that the key was _reserved_ and
>> should not be changed by users or 3rd-party libraries.
>
> Are you talking about the Alt-F4 (or M-f4) discussion?  If so, that was
> heavily influenced by issues of whether Emacs should respect window system
> conventions (and if so, which systems), and whether Emacs should attempt
> to be just like every other program (for newbies' sake) but still somehow
> better, and whether there was a difference between unbound and
> specifically turned off, and how many layers of indirection to provide in
> keymap customization, etc.  It's a very poor example for the issue of
> adding non-famous keys to the default global map.  (It is, however, a very
> good example of how contentious any tampering with that global map is.)

It was also somewhat of a special case in that on some systems (e.g.
Gnome, KDE) Emacs actually doesn't have the power to override the
system-wide binding, but on other systems (Windows) it overrides the
system-wide binding by default, just by not passing the keys through
to Windows.

-PJ