Re: Emacs key bindings through the ages

[Barry Margolin <barmar@alum.mit.edu>]

In article <1195020235.983333.46390@o38g2000hse.googlegroups.com>,
 bramble <cadet.bramble@gmail.com> wrote:

> The default GNU Emacs key bindings seem to work very well. They seem
> particularly well-thought-out, in fact. Like stones in a stream, worn
> by movement and time to have very few rough edges... They mesh well
> with the ascii control characters, and I particularly like how M-<foo>
> is often used as a sort of "turbo boost" to C-<foo> (like C-f vs. M-f,
> for example). In cases where it makes no sense to boost the C-key,
> Emacs often has elegant mnemonic bindings, for example, M-u, M-l, M-c.
> 
> Were the bindings designed as such right from the beginning by only
> RMS? Or have they morphed over the years, with user and developer
> requests guiding changes? Can anyone shed any light on the history of
> the default key binding choices?

Almost all the simple Control and Meta bindings are pretty much the same 
as they were on the original ITS EMACS 30 years ago.  C-x was the common 
prefix character at that time, C-c came later (my guess is that he 
didn't want to put an EMACS key binding on the OS's default interrupt 
character), and the basic file read/write operations were on C-x C-f, 
C-x C-s, and C-x C-w just as they are now.  Many of the Control-Meta 
(s-expression) commands are also the same or similar.

So someone who entered the time machine that was developed at MIT in 
1980 could come out today and have little problem using Emacs.  It's 
mostly grown by accretion, not by reassigning too many existing key 
bindings.  The use of C-c as the mode-specific prefix has prevented 
conflicts with the old bindings.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar@alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
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