Re: Experimentally unbind M-o on the trunk

[Yuri Khan <yuri.v.khan@gmail.com>]

On Thu, 11 Feb 2021 at 21:02, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

> > > Case in point: if a command isn't bound to a key it doesn't show up in
> > > help, so there is this pressure to bind everything that could possibly
> > > be useful to some person some day to some key. What if instead help
> > > showed all the interactive commands provided by the mode? What if M-x
> > > were smarter about highlighting mode specific commands?
> > >
> > > Perhaps exploring these kinds of ideas would be useful.
> >
> > The mechanism you’re describing is called a menu.
> >
> > Case in point: In almost every GUI program that follows the CUA
> > guidelines, you can invoke the File | Open command by pressing Alt+F
> > O.
>
> The original suggestion was to make it easier to discover _unknown_
> commands, whereas your menu analogy talks about invoking a _known_
> command.  I don't see how this analogy helps, what did I miss?

The discovery scenario is: I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I
can progressively narrow down the command space by choosing a submenu
at each step. Once I’ve found the command I need, I can execute it
right away and be done with it.

The next few times I need it, I vaguely know where (spatially) in the
menu it is. I then execute it by following the same path through the
menu.

If I use it frequently, I will notice the key binding displayed in the
right margin, memorize it, and switch to using it. At this point, the
menu has done its job.

However, not all commands have bindings. And a conventional
application makes every command quickly accessible via Alt+<letter>
<letter>…, or <Alt> <letter> <letter>…, or F10 <letter> <letter>…,
with all commands in every given submenu having unique mnemonics. As
an example, every time I log onto an unfamiliar ssh server and start
Midnight Commander, I know to press F9 o c t Enter F9 o p y Enter to
configure it to my liking.

Being able to execute commands via menu and mnemonics reduces the need
to bind commands. I will even go so far as to claim that such Emacs
keymaps as C-x v are poor man’s menus — they let the user execute
commands using long key sequences without the benefit of providing
discovery and visual reassurance. (Cue Drew pitching Icicles key
completion.)