Re: Proposal: new default bindings for winner and windmove

[Daniel Colascione <dancol@dancol.org>]

On June 23, 2024 6:05:13 AM EDT, Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> wrote:
>Hello, Stefan and Stefan.
>
>On Fri, Jun 21, 2024 at 15:39:09 -0500, Stefan Kangas wrote:
>> Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:
>
>> > A few years ago, Daniel suggested:
>> >> Likewise, for windmove, we can bind C-x 4 {left, right, up, down} and DWIM
>> >> for people automatically, enabled by default.
>> >
>> > AFAICT we still don't actually provide any keybindings for the windmove
>> > commands by default.  Did I miss a controversy about that, or did it
>> > just fall through the cracks?
>
>> FWIW, I don't remember any controversy either, so my guess is that it
>> just fell through the cracks.
>
>I would be against using C-x 4 <arrow keys> or C-x 5 <arrow-keys> for
>windmove (or anything else) by default.  Key sequences with arrow keys
>are too few, and too precious, to use for anything not critically
>important.
>
>windmove is not critically important.  Either it isn't used at all by a
>user (likely most users), or it is used all the time (by a small number
>of users).  In the latter case, the user will already have bound the
>commands to key sequences, since they are not useful called from M-x.
>
>It wasn't so long ago that we were removing default key bindings so as
>to free them up for other uses.  I don't think there's any reason to
>reverse that policy for windmove.  It just isn't important enough.
>
>There will be users who've bound these key bindings for their own uses.
>Let's not mess these users around.

The arrow keys don't have any meaning after C-x 4 today, and the meaning I've been wanting to give them is useful and logical. I've been using the arrow key setup for years locally and it works very well. It really does make window management much less annoying, and it's not like we're going to use the arrow keys for anything else under C-x 4.


As for windmove being used by users --- well, wouldn't it be nice if we had metrics like other modern software projects? But that aside, even if windmove is sparsely used today, might that be because it's inconvenient to use without bindings? Your argument is a general purpose argument against having default bindings, isn't it? Key bindings are precious, and we shouldn't waste them on unimportant things, and if the things were important, we wouldn't need default key bindings for them anyway because users would have already created their own. The argument seems a bit circular to me.