Re: [comp.emacs] Announcing Easymacs: an all-in-one Emacs configuration for newbies

[Luc Teirlinck]

Lennart Borgman wrote:

   Which make me think that these two things would overlap if the key 
   bindings where defined through define-minor-mode.

In a certain sense, global minor modes can be thought of as keybinding
themes (if the main thing they do is activate a keymap).  However,
there is a convention that minor modes can only bind a very limited
number of key sequences.  Of course, a "theme" minor mode can get
around that by simply disregarding that convention.  I am not really
familiar with cua-mode or pc-selection-mode, but I guess that this is
exactly what they do.  A "theme" minor mode has to be very careful,
however, because it normally is intended as a substitute for the
global map.  The local map (usually the major mode map) overrides the
global map, but not the substitutions to the global map provided by
the theme minor mode.  This could potentially mess up some major modes.

Sincerely,

Luc.