Re: PROPOSAL: Repurpose one key and reserve it for third-party packages

[Sean Whitton <spwhitton@spwhitton.name>]

Hello,

On Tue 09 Feb 2021 at 05:19PM GMT, Gregory Heytings wrote:

>>> How about C-\ or C-^? Historically these were used as substitutes for
>>> C-s and C-q when editing via serial lines (and there's still a function
>>> enable-flow-control that activates it). Certainly that's no longer a
>>> frequent use case?
>>
>> C-\ is used to set the input method.  But we could move that
>> functionality to C-^, and then give up C-\ to third party packages.
>>
>
> Except that \ is hard to type on most keyboards: C and \ are the two most
> distant keys on the most widespread keyboard layout (QWERTY), and on other
> keyboards \ requires pressing Shift or AltGr.  Not exactly an appealing
> prefix.

Hmm, if you're using two hands for the C and the \ and you're on QWERTY
then it's not too bad.

Should we be trying to take into account other layouts, given that most
of Emacs' default bindings are designed for a keyboard which doesn't
even exist anymore (Space Cadet)?

ISTM that we are only rarely going to find options which are optimum for
all layouts at once, so maybe we should expect users of those layouts to
move hard things around (and that moving around could be included in
Emacs).

-- 
Sean Whitton