Re: Key Mapping Proposal

[Teemu Likonen <tlikonen@iki.fi>]

On 2010-01-15 19:03 (-0500), Noah Lavine wrote:

> I'd like to suggest a change to the way modes bind keys, to make it
> easier for users to customize keys.

> My suggestion is this: have one location which stores the user's
> keybinding for the "forward" key, whatever "forward" means for a
> particular mode. Any given mode would then use this to bind their
> particular "forward" function to whatever key the user wanted. Do the
> same for other keys with conventional meaning, and then modify the
> major modes to use these in their keybindings.

I don't know how difficult and how much work this would be but as a user
I would like such feature very much. I faced a related problem with my
ergo-movement-mode [1] which, for example, uses

          i
    M-  j k l

keys for basic cursor movements. The mode actually doesn't bind them
directly but relatively. That is, M-l is bound to

    (lambda () (interactive)
      (call-interactively
       (key-binding "\C-f")))

so it executes whatever command is bound to C-f. This works in all major
modes automatically but the problem is that I can't rebind C-f to
anything. The default Emacs global keybindings are not practically
customizable.

---------------
 1. http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ErgoMovementMode