Re: Why all the Alt bindings by default?

[Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 7:20 AM, Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> wrote:
>> > What is the new feature?
>>
>> There is nothing new here.  This is almost as old as Emacs.
>
> I thought that seeing `A-/' etc. listed as a binding was new in Emacs 24.  But
> following the same recipe in Emacs 23.2 and 23.3 (but not 23.1) shows the same
> thing.  So this was new with Emacs 23.2, not Emacs 24, and it belongs in the
> Emacs 23.2 NEWS.
>
> Or maybe you feel that it is a bug rather than a feature or the consequence of a
> feature?
>
>
>

Regardless of whether it appeared in emacs 23 or 24 or whether it
requires more than 1 C-h b for the Alt 'bindings' to be shown with C-h
b, the bottom line is that these key translations are shown as key
bindings when they are not. Apart from being misleading for users, I
find it a pain having to scroll past all of these misleading entries
to get to what I'm after - information on key bindings.

Something is needed that at the very least will filter these entries
out of C-h b.

One question I do have - what happens if you do have a keyboard that
is setup to have both meta and alt (as well as super and hypa) and you
want to do a real alt binding using one of these keys? It is fairly
trivial to setup your keyboard to have hypa nd supa under X, so I
suspect adding alt is not that hard given the number of keyboards with
extra/dead keys available.

Tim


-- 
Tim Cross