Re: Ctrl-[ ?

["Søren Pilgård" <fiskomaten@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Jun 7, 2019 at 9:51 PM Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
>
> > Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> > From: Clément Pit-Claudel <cpitclaudel@gmail.com>
> > Date: Fri, 7 Jun 2019 11:02:12 -0400
> >
> > >>   (global-set-key (kbd "ESC") #'forward-char)
> > >>
> > >> …and all that achieved was to break all keybindings starting with meta.
> > >
> > > In what buffer?  If there's a local binding, it will shadow the
> > > global one, so to be sure rebind both.
> >
> > I *scratch* (so in emacs-lisp-mode).  It does work in fundamental mode, but it still breaks meta (M-x is undefined after redefining ESC)
>
> The original question was about redefining ESC.  How to do that
> without making Meta undefined is a separate issue.  (ESC by default is
> the prefix key of the Meta keymap, so it's a small wonder that
> redefining ESC breaks Meta.  You will have the same effect if you
> redefine C-x: all the C-x sequences will stop working.)
>

So for a lot of users, using graphical Emacs, not knowing the
intricacies of af tty the following is rather baffling:
C-[ is ESC, ESC is Meta and Meta is Alt.
(For a confusing definition of "is")
This is one of the things that makes Emacs feel very archaic. I do
believe that most users coming to Emacs during the last 5-10 years are
using the graphical version. Yeah we should keep the ability to use
both the tty version and the graphical version as is. But forcing this
schema on everyone is not really beneficial.