In reply to Drew's email that seems to have started by mistake in a new thread
> And I'm wondering why we need to provide such "shortcuts". It is
> *trivial* for anyone to bind keys to insert any chars one uses often.
> I don't see how we're doing anyone any favors by this.
>
> What's so special about any particular set of Unicode chars that we
> should bother to offer a predefined set of bindings for them (even if
> turning on that set is optional)? Now we're even down to looking to
> bind ≫ or »? How silly is that? (Well, I'm sure those chars are
> very useful for some people - but those who need 'em can bind 'em.)
>
> Where's the beef?
As I mentioned in the first email, I can easily bind those to what I want.
I was motivated to email about this because I found the binding "_<" for ≤ a bit unnatural. In all the coding languages I used, ≤ was always represented as "<=" and so thought that that binding would make more sense.
Then I realized that "<" was already taken for the « and so we could not have the "<=" binding.
And then the thread evolved as you see.
As Stefan mentioned, the "<" binding was added at the time when probably the other unicode characters were probably not popular.
So this was just a little gesture to "upgrade" the out-of-box bindings for "C-x 8" since we are already setting a few default bindings for some unicode characters.
I am fine with this discussion ending here and I will go back to using a little hydra with a bunch of unicode chars I use frequently.