Re: a key system to replace gnu emacs's 1000 default keybindings

["B. T. Raven" <btraven@nihilo.net>]

Die Tue May 22 2012 14:18:41 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time) Xah Lee
<xahlee@gmail.com> scripsit:

> haha, yes the subject line is right.
> 
> my first voice blog.
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sXu4pf67i8
> 
> 〈The Roadmap to Completely Replace Emacs's Key System〉
> http://xahlee.org/emacs/emacs_keybinding_redesign.html
> 
>  Xah

"
Here's a new thing i've learned. Normally, it's a good advice to press
combination keys using both hands. That is, suppose you want to press
【Ctrl+x】. You should use right hand to hold right Ctrl and left hand
to press x. But if you are a touch typer and leave your hand in standard
position, so you press the x with 4th finger. That'll cause a major
problem if done often.
"

This was obvious from the start. You shouldn't have switched to CUA.
It's important that additional mod keys (stacked into one keychord) are
only marginally more difficult than fewer mod keys. What's need is new
keyboard hardware layout to truly optimize for Emacs. With all mod keys
below the row from sem to Z (Dvorak) split backspace-space bar under
that row with super, meta(alt), and ctl farthest inboard, symmetrical
left and right.

"
but anyhow, in past week's thinking, i came up with the thought of
eliminating all combination keys. I've been on this road in recent
years, but this week i made a more systematic approach, and added 30 or
so sequential keys with the F key. By my analysis, i think sequential
keys are much superior than key combos in many ways. Health,
memorization, grouping... and i think even faster to operate on the long
run on average. Here's a draft of reasons:
"

If you are that drastic you might as well go whole hog and redesign the
Emacs ui for gaming keyboards with n-key rollover. That would make room
for comfortably adding trillions of new bindings.

I am convinced that whatever keyboard customizations can't be
accomplished with dvorak layout, xmodmap (or Keytweak), will need a new
hardware device. I think that ergonomic science is far enough advanced
that the mouse can be done away with for most applications (even Autocad
and Photoshop).

Besides dvorak layout and keytweak rearrangement in order to locate the
most used modkeys closest to the (split) backspace-spacebar, the only
changes I've made to default bindings are these:

;; Single char cursor movement on Dvorak layout
(global-set-key [(meta h)] 'backward-char-nomark)
(global-set-key [(meta n)] 'forward-char-nomark)
(global-set-key [(meta c)] 'previous-line-nomark)
(global-set-key [(meta t)] 'next-line-nomark)
(global-set-key [(meta H)] 'mark-paragraph) ;; upcased default bindings
(global-set-key [(meta N)] 'next-buffer)
(global-set-key [(meta C)] 'capitalize-word)
(global-set-key [(meta T)] 'transpose-words)

shift-backspace and shift-space were at one time assigned to ( and )
[much easier than shift-9 and shift-10) but shift-space now resolves to
space, I know not why.

btw, this is all on w32 ver. 23.3

Ed