Re: Emacs learning curve

[Teemu Likonen <tlikonen@iki.fi>]

* 2010-07-16 19:07 (-0400), Sean Sieger wrote:

>> Powerful text editor should depend on ergonomics and muscle memory
>> and make rebinding keys easy (for different keyboard layouts like
>> Dvorak). While Emacs is otherwise very powerful text editor it has
>> these serious flaws:
>>
>>   - The default movement keys are not ergonomic.
>>
>>   - While rebinding movement keys is technically easy, in practice it
>>     is very difficult because many/some major modes will reuse the
>>     f-b-n-p mnemonic practice anyway. User would need tons of custom
>>     hooks for different major modes to change bindings like C-c
>>     C-fbnp to something more ergonomic.
>>
>> The established (mnemonic) practice leaves me to conclude that
>> tolerating the suboptimal default keys is still lesser pain. The
>> situation is suboptimal but will probably never change.
>
> Context has considerable bearing here.  The greater the touch typing
> skill, the lesser the difficulty.  No?

I'm not sure what you mean by context here but maybe you are right that
touch typing reduces the difficulty. I have been touch typing since
1992. I used Vim for five years and then switched to Emacs for its great
extensions and extensibility. Of course I have learned Emacs keys and be
efficient with them but I already had a great motivation to learn Emacs
for its other features. I never learned to _like_ Emacs movement keys
and feel that they are just tolerable or manageable compared to Vim.

   (I believe that there would be noticeable new interest towards Emacs
    if it, for example, announced that its version 25.1 has added a mode
    that switches to ergonomic key bindings.)

Anyway, I'm not trying to change anybody's mind about the default key
bindings. I have just been hoping that user could practically design her
own global bindings but even that's not quite possible because the
f-b-n-p mnemonics and other default keys are so deeply hard-coded
everywhere. There's not enough abstraction on that front.

I filed a bug report (with a patch) about lessening the hard-coding of
keys [1]. I also wrote a message here [2] telling that function
substitute-key-definition has problems and suggested using define-key
function with its [remap ...] feature instead. So far neither have got
any comments or actions. That's quite fine. I don't believe any more
that there is much hope for making custom global bindings practically
easier. A lot of custom hooks for redesigning major modes would be
needed anyway.

So, I'll just tolerate the default keys (I already have them deeply in
my muscle memory) and accept that improving Emacs means just extending
the environment and adding more major modes. And that's quite fine too.
No frustration nor hard feelings toward anybody. I just had a personal
hope. :-)

--------------------
 1. http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=6632
 2. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel/127329