Re: PROPOSAL: Repurpose one key and reserve it for third-party packages

[Sean Whitton]

Hello,

On Tue 09 Feb 2021 at 07:43PM +02, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

>> From: Sean Whitton <spwhitton@spwhitton.name>
>> Date: Tue, 09 Feb 2021 09:54:59 -0700
>> Cc: Gregory Heytings <gregory@heytings.org>,
>>  Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com>, rms@gnu.org, emacs-devel@gnu.org
>>
>> Aren't the current bindings under M-o intended for that halcyon future
>> in which we can use Emacs as a word processor, not just a text editor?
>> Like enriched-mode, but for file formats like .odt, where buffer faces
>> set with M-o get translated into something in the file format upon save.
>>
>> I assume that most of the bindings under M-o were made with that sort of
>> usage of Emacs in mind.  It strikes me as a bit sad to unbind M-o as it
>> would sort of be saying that we no longer think Emacs is ever going to
>> be much use for editing non-plain text.
>
> We could make these bindings local to the modes where they are
> relevant, for example Text mode and its descendants.  There's no need
> for a global binding, at least not necessarily.

I agree that it would be good to find a non-global way to do this.

Perhaps we could set up a major mode to be inherited by modes like
enriched-mode, which sets up a binding which is at least as convenient
to use as M-o is right now?

That way we can ensure that the bindings to set faces are consistent
between major modes, which is what we would be at risk of losing if we
drop the global binding.

For the sake of ease of use I'd suggest replacing M-o b with C-c C-c b.

Does this sound sensible?  It would be a shame if we ended up with each
possible WYSIWYG mode defining its own face-setting bindings.

Also, new non-WYSIWYG modes could re-use the same bindings to, e.g.,
insert asterisks around text meant to be bold.

-- 
Sean Whitton