Re: how to change C-x prefix to C-k in a clean way?

["B. T. Raven" <nihil@nihilo.net>]

Rustom Mody wrote:
> <Xah wrote>
>> i learned dvorak in 1992 or 1993. More or less due to my
>> nerdiness towards better design. I don't have typing speed
>> problem nor RSI in anyway.
> 
> I guess anyone using/working with/working on emacs has to be almost by
> definition a productivity-junkie starting with rms, going on to the
> fancy modes for programming and sysad support of the last couple of
> decades and today's hot stuff like org, icicles etc.
> 
> I toyed with the idea of trying dvorak for a while but then somehow
> came to the conclusion that it does not go far enough.  You see dvorak
> was invented in the age of mechanical typewriters which had two
> fundamental assumptions (or invariants in programmerese)
> 1. The typist can type only 1 key at a time
> 2. One (key)stroke generates exactly 1 letter
> 
> Obviously neither of these is a necessary assumption today though both
> are universally assumed.
> 
> Well 1. has the exceptions like Ctrl/Alt/Shift but these are very
> minor exceptions if you compare them with the possibilities of
> full-scale chording which you may appreciate as a pianist! A
> simplistic estimate of this being: 10 fingers -> 26 letters means
> (partial) functions from a 10 element set to a 26 element set, which
> is 27 raised to 10 (thats a number in trillions!)  This is way more
> chords than any reasonable sized dictionary and hence every word could
> be in principle 1 single chord, ie keystroke.  Even if this set is
> pruned many billions of times for eliminating inconvenient/impossible
> chords.  Nevertheless the hundred most frequent words of English (
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_English ) could
> easily be assigned one unique chord and that would mean 1-stroke
> 1-word (strangely comes back to Chinese by a back door).
> 
> Ive not gone into this more because even simple keyboard hackery like
> flipping Ctrl and CapsLock causes so many problems in practice that
> full scale converting of a qwerty keyboard into a 'piano' is a little
> technically daunting.
> 
> So let me go on to point 2 which (I hope!) is more feasible and
> productive -- in a word abbrevs. Evidently even adding a few dozen
> abrevs for the most commonly used words that we use in some context
> would significantly reduce typing.
> 
> But trying to explore this further Ive started studying the alphabetic
> shorthand called keyscript [ http://www.freewebs.com/cassyjanek ]
> It has a whole system of shorthanding English into ASCII with some
> fair amount of 'logic'.
> Here is a taste (though not the logic) :
> 
> One letter abbrevs for the most common words
> b = but
> c = with
> d = had
> e = this
> f = of
> g = that
> h = the
> j = which
> n = and
> ...etc etc upto
> z = was
> 
> then common phrases
> able to  = cb
> had been = dn
> do not   = dx
> did not  = ex
> does not = dsx
> etc
> 
> and a few dozen other abbrevs like
> 
> become = bc
> better = bee
> before = bf
> being  = bg
> below  = bl
> consequences = csqa
> unfortunately = nxf
> same = sa
> said = sd
> such = sc
> statement = ztx
> sufficient = sfj
> 
> 
>> The significantly noticeable thing is the comfort. I didn't realize
>> it until in late 1990s, when sometimes i had to go back to qwerty
>> as a sys admin, and the first thing to note is that the fingers
>> jump wildly.
> 
> I am sure you can see that the 'wild jumping' you describe as reducing
> from QWERTY to dvorak would reduce very significantly with such a
> system -- dont you think?
> 
> The only problem is that -- as a confirmed productivity junkie -- I
> realise that working very hard to become more productive is a surefire
> way of doing no real work!! Ive spent about 3 weeks on this and I am
> really sweating!
> 
> 

Your modest proposal is brilliant in some as yet to be specified way. 
The only problem I see with it is if it has to be read aloud. For 
example, nxf e dsx bc bee if read out loud should probably be spelled 
out in full. So, since so much time and space is saved by abbreviating 
words, there will be a concomitant opportunity to actually expand the 
individual letters, as in areeeayeellellwye 
essdoubleyoueeayeteeeyeengee! The only thing I am not sure of is whether 
that 26^10 (~141 trillion)is even close to being equal to c(26,1) + 
C(26,2)+ .... C(26,10). But it doesn't matter. The few hundred key 
combos in the repertoir of even the most accomplished power user is a 
tiny fraction of those potentially available by combining modifiers 
(Shift, Control, Meta, Alt, Super, Hyper) with the other fifty-some keys 
within easy reach. For instance, I just queried the binding of C-H-M-s-^ 
and found that it was undefined. Surprise, surprise.

Still Xah is right about Dvorak. It's about 10% faster and 30% less 
taxing. (Numbers grabbed out of the air that seem about right.)