Re: Key themes

[Bruce Ingalls <bingalls@fit-zones.DELETE-THE-SPAM-BLOCK.com>]

David Masterson wrote:
> Bruce Ingalls writes:
>>Has anyone tried to write keybinding themes for EMacs, so that I could
>>just go to Customize, and choose
> 
>>o Native
>>o CUA  ...
>>etc.
> 
>>Is this even feasible?
> 
> Wouldn't it be a matter of writing a function for each that does a
> series of define-key (or global-set-key) statements and then putting
> the appropriate function into a hook (like after-init-hook)?

Hm. I think that you answered that it is *possible*.

I was looking for a bigger picture, that there may be several 
suboptimally underengineered libraries with hard-coded keybindings, that 
would clash or suffer, as a result.

Example: The Microsoft extensions to CUA tend to use C-s to save.
This is bound to search, which should be remapped to C-f
C-f is bound to forward, but [right] (arrow) is good enough.

I now go ahead, and make all these remappings. So far, so good.
What about third party libraries that add fancy extra functionality to 
Search?
Further example: tiny-tools has tiny-search. Will this, and others be 
losing, if C-s no longer does search?

Frankly, Emacs is no longer ugly. It is no longer difficult. Its 
slowness has mostly been cured by fast hardware.
I believe that the only resistance to beginners are its obscure keybindings.
The other issue is that most beginners won't bother to learn elisp; that 
is not a problem, until they desire to add new libraries.
The Emacs community seems to have little interest in building an 
Eclipse-style plugin architecture any time soon.

At least, we can make the keybindings easy to use, for now.