unofficial mirror of help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
* how to change C-x prefix to C-k in a clean way?
@ 2009-03-07  3:27 Xah Lee
  2009-03-07  5:21 ` Teemu Likonen
                   ` (2 more replies)
  0 siblings, 3 replies; 16+ messages in thread
From: Xah Lee @ 2009-03-07  3:27 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: help-gnu-emacs

is there a way to remap all the C-x key to another, say C-k?

I've been using this
(keyboard-translate ?\C-t ?\C-x)
for over 2 years (on dvorak. Dvorak t is qwerty k.)

However, that does not stop C-x from working, and any keypress of C-k,
regardless if it is the start of combination, will be remapped to C-x.

What i really want is to remap C-x prefix to C-k, as if they are
defined that way. (so that i can map Cut (kill-region) to C-x and not
have to load the complex cua-mode)

besides modifying every elisp file, is it possible to do this as a
wrapper? Perhaps by modifying the global-map entry of C-x?

  Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
* Re: how to change C-x prefix to C-k in a clean way?
@ 2009-03-12 13:40 Rustom Mody
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 16+ messages in thread
From: Rustom Mody @ 2009-03-12 13:40 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: help-gnu-emacs

<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!




^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
[parent not found: <mailman.3015.1237105221.31690.help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>]
* Re: how to change C-x prefix to C-k in a clean way?
@ 2009-03-20  7:49 Rustom Mody
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 16+ messages in thread
From: Rustom Mody @ 2009-03-20  7:49 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: help-gnu-emacs

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 4114 bytes --]

On Mar 20, 9:07 am, Xah Lee <xah...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mar 16, 6:17 am, rustom <rustompm...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Rustom,
>
> Some sort of shorthand writing can indeed improve one's typing of
> natural language by a lot. I haven't studied any particular shorthand
> system, my impression is that there are quite a few.
>
> ( indeed, Wikipedia lists about 40.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
> Shorthand )
>
> shorthand systems are designed for professional dictation clerk or
> similar. Shorthand system has little offer specific to emacs for
> improving speed of writing natural lang or programing. (abbrev system
> and templates (e.g. yasnippet) are much more useful)
>
> also, there are several chording systems or chording keyboards over
> the past decades. In general, they are not practical. Some of them are
> envisioned to replace the standard keyboard, but they have their own
> problems. The first adoption problem is that chording system requires
> learning to use, while keyboard doesn't.  For vast majority of
> computer users, hunt & peck works well because they don't have a need
> to type much. Note that Wikipedia also has a few articles on the
> various chording keyboards.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
> Chorded_keyboard
>
> from a research point of view, one could imagine a input device that's
> radical and so well designed, so that it takes ergonomics from the
> ground up, where the hardware naturally fits the shape and movement of
> human hand, and uses perhaps chording chord chording. And perhaps
> comes with a fancy integrated pointing device. And perhaps uses a
> software layout (of the chording) based on a shorthand systems, and
> for various programing languages too... often, radical general
> solution as innovation without a immediate, concrete, specific problem
> it solves, is not likely to become adopted anytime soon.
>
> (PS thanks Rustom for the email notice. Sorry for the delay in
> replying.  Also, thanks Alan Mackenzie et al. I haven't yet studied
> your advices in detail.  )
>
>  Xah


Hi Xah.
I guess my own post was a bit rambling so my point was a bit lost and some
other stuff got emphasised.
I was saying more or less what you are saying -- viz
chording systems are (probably) fantastic research ideas but too
impractical.

yasnippet (templates in general) are useful for programming languages.

And for plain text abbrevs are probably best.

My suggestion is for an *alphabetic shorthand system*  viz abbrevs.

Well here is a small suggestion (request?) for you
Youve done a lot of analysis of emacs keystrokes and you have a huge site of
stuff.
Would you try running the McIllroy classic on your site?
http://www.unix.com/unix-dummies-questions-answers/42789-searching-displaying-most-commonly-used-words.html
This will do for words the same analysis that you've already done for
keystrokes.

I think -- just guesses -- you will get figures like this:

Top frequency 24 words (or 26 since I expect 'I' and 'a' to occur there) --
30 %
Next 100 words    -- 35 %
Next 500 words -- 30 %

Assuming you do get something like this, setting up 125 abbrevs and taking
say 2 weeks to learn them, will it not make your typing almost halved. [I am
assuming that the average length of even common English words is about 3.5
chars whereas the average length of these abbrevs will be about 1.5 (1.25 if
you take weighted averages, 1.1 if you add common phrases).

On Mar 16, 10:18 am, "B. T. Raven" <ni...@nihilo.net> wrote:
> Your modest proposal is brilliant in some as yet to be specified way.

Yes it is brilliant. (I of course did not invent it, its from
http://www.freewebs.com/cassyjanek )
My 'specified way' of analyzing this brilliance is thusly:

Compression (as in gzip LZ jpeg etc) has some key ideas
a. Huffmann coding
b. Length encoding
c. Right amt of lossiness

This lady (without evidently any background in CS!! ) has taken these ideas
and made a system that migrates these ideas from the digital 2-it (aka bit)
world to the 26-it biological box atop our shoulders.

Now what I am trying to do is burn some new firmware (and sweating with the
heat!!)

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 5019 bytes --]

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2009-03-20 10:53 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 16+ messages (download: mbox.gz follow: Atom feed
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2009-03-07  3:27 how to change C-x prefix to C-k in a clean way? Xah Lee
2009-03-07  5:21 ` Teemu Likonen
2009-03-07 23:19   ` Xah Lee
2009-03-10 13:02     ` Alan Mackenzie
2009-03-10 18:42       ` Johan Bockgård
2009-03-10 22:50       ` Raoul Gough
2009-03-08 15:05 ` Michael Heerdegen
2009-03-11 15:36 ` rustom
2009-03-11 21:31   ` Xah Lee
2009-03-12 17:45     ` prad
  -- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2009-03-12 13:40 Rustom Mody
     [not found] <mailman.3015.1237105221.31690.help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>
2009-03-16  5:18 ` B. T. Raven
2009-03-16 13:17   ` rustom
2009-03-20  4:07     ` Xah Lee
2009-03-20 10:53     ` Rupert Swarbrick
2009-03-20  7:49 Rustom Mody

This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for read-only IMAP folder(s) and NNTP newsgroup(s).