Any hope of being able to redefine C-x without problems???

Any hope of being able to redefine C-x without problems???

[Christian Seberino]

I made C-x run a new function of my choice.  This worked great for months
but I must have started doing stuff that conflicted with C-x because it stopped
working altogether after a while.

Now I am trying to use gdb (debugger) within Emacs and it can't even start
because gdb defines it's "prefix" to be C-x.

I tried to redefine gud-key-prefix but I could not.  It seems C-x is extra
touchy.  Any hope of pulling this off?

Chris

Re: Any hope of being able to redefine C-x without problems???

[Jesper Harder]

seberino@spawar.navy.mil (Christian Seberino) writes:

> Now I am trying to use gdb (debugger) within Emacs and it can't even
> start because gdb defines it's "prefix" to be C-x.
>
> I tried to redefine gud-key-prefix but I could not.  It seems C-x is
> extra touchy.  Any hope of pulling this off?

No.  Emacs reserves a number of key bindings for users, which modes
mustn't touch.  They are

* `C-c LETTER'   (C-c followed by any letter), and
* The function key F5-F9.

Use one of those reserved bindings to avoid conflict with major and
minor modes.

Re: Any hope of being able to redefine C-x without problems???

[Christian Seberino]

Jesper

There is no way to write some lisp code that makes me able
to define C-x and alter gdb to not have a problem?
I thought you could do anything in elisp? 


Chris

Jesper Harder <harder@myrealbox.com> wrote in message news:<m3smmt90od.fsf@defun.localdomain>...
> seberino@spawar.navy.mil (Christian Seberino) writes:
> 
> > Now I am trying to use gdb (debugger) within Emacs and it can't even
> > start because gdb defines it's "prefix" to be C-x.
> >
> > I tried to redefine gud-key-prefix but I could not.  It seems C-x is
> > extra touchy.  Any hope of pulling this off?
> 
> No.  Emacs reserves a number of key bindings for users, which modes
> mustn't touch.  They are
> 
> * `C-c LETTER'   (C-c followed by any letter), and
> * The function key F5-F9.
> 
> Use one of those reserved bindings to avoid conflict with major and
> minor modes.

Re: Any hope of being able to redefine C-x without problems???

[Jesper Harder]

seberino@spawar.navy.mil (Christian Seberino) writes:

> Jesper Harder <harder@myrealbox.com> wrote:
>
>> Use one of those reserved bindings to avoid conflict with major and
>> minor modes.
>
> There is no way to write some lisp code that makes me able to define
> C-x and alter gdb to not have a problem?  I thought you could do
> anything in elisp?

It's possible.  But `C-x' is used as prefix by hundreds of basic Emacs
functions -- not just gdb.  You'll have redefine the bindings for all
of them.

A lot of tedious work for something which can easily be avoided by
using another key-binding which is guaranteed not to conflict with any
pre-defined Emacs bindings.

Re: Any hope of being able to redefine C-x without problems???

[Jesper Harder]

Jesper Harder <harder@myrealbox.com> writes:

> seberino@spawar.navy.mil (Christian Seberino) writes:
>
>> There is no way to write some lisp code that makes me able to
>> define C-x and alter gdb to not have a problem?  I thought you
>> could do anything in elisp?
>
> It's possible.  But `C-x' is used as prefix by hundreds of basic
> Emacs functions -- not just gdb.  You'll have redefine the bindings
> for all of them.
>
> A lot of tedious work for something which can easily be avoided by
> using another key-binding which is guaranteed not to conflict with any
> pre-defined Emacs bindings.

OK, it's not so tedious after all.  If you want to bind a function,
say, `my-function' to `C-x' you can do this:

     (keyboard-translate ?\C-x 'foo)
     (global-set-key [foo] 'my-function)

If you need to call a function that's normally bound to a C-x sequence
you can redefine another key, e.g. F5, to act as C-x:

     (define-key key-translation-map [f5] "\C-x")

Then you can type `F5 C-f' to call `find-file' which is bound to 
`C-x C-f'.