Re: Proposal: "C-z <letter>" reserved for users

[Skip Montanaro <skip.montanaro@gmail.com>]

>
> It *is* dangerous.  Typing my `C-z whatever' keybinding ...


That, I believe, is on you. If you want to personalize your Emacs
environment, that's fine, but C-z is a perfectly fine keybinding as-is. I
agree it is low-use, but when you need it, you need it. I assume if you
encounter it in some context where it's a surprise, you are either typing
into someone else's Emacs instance (see below) or you ran Emacs with "-q".
If the latter, don't do that except in the rare cases where you are
debugging ELisp problems. If the former, get the other person to type. If
you are using Emacs in a context where you normally don't have your
personal setup available (say, as root on a machine for which you don't
have a login), be careful or use vi. If you do have a login, use "-u". (I
don't know how Emacs works on Windows. My only experience is with Unix,
Linux and MacOS, all of which support using Emacs from a terminal window,
where C-z is an absolute requirement.)

C-z has been there in every version of Emacs I have ever used (Gosling
Emacs, GNU Emacs, XEmacs, jed, microemacs, ...). In fact, while poking
around for a microemacs package on my laptop, I just encountered another
Emacs-like editor for the first time, mg, and installed it on my Raspberry
Pi. Yup, C-z works there as well. C-z is about as fundamental a keybinding
as C-a, C-e, C-f and C-b. If you run "emacs -nw" how do you pause it to get
back to your shell prompt? In fact, C-z works in vi (and less and tar and
rsync and ssh (sort of) ...) as well. There is a very good reason C-z is
bound to suspend-frame.

This thread reminded me of a situation I encountered way BITD when I was
working at GE R&D. We were early adopters of Sun's new fangled
workstations. One group got the ball rolling with Sun-1s (we went to see
it, but Sun hadn't even installed the operating system yet - still, it was
awesome), but most of us began our Unix love affair with the Sun-2 series.
(Before that we were VMS users and most of us software types either used
Gosling Emacs or DEC's screen-oriented editor whose name I've long ago
forgotten.) This incident probably occurred in the Sun-2/Sun-3 era (so,
according to Wikipedia, well before 1990). For some reason, a couple of us
needed to help out another guy we didn't know. (Maybe he was new and we
were helping him with site-specific configuration? I no longer recall.) We
needed to do something with Emacs. He was also an Emacs user, but had so
thoroughly remapped his keybindings that his Emacs instance was completely
unusable by anybody but him. I don't think he had remapped from QWERTY to
Dvorak, but essentially everything not bound to self-insert-command was
different. I don't know why "emacs -q" didn't come to mind. Maybe it was an
already running session? In any case, we had to dictate to him what to do,
because we were unable to use his editor.

Skip