Re: Experimentally unbind M-o on the trunk

[Yuri Khan]

On Thu, 11 Feb 2021 at 02:11, Matt Armstrong <matt@rfc20.org> wrote:

> What if having a key binding was just one possible way to make a command
> easy and convenient to find and invoke. What if there were other equally
> good ways, and we all thought it would be strange to bind a precious key
> to a command if it were rarely used in practice?
>
> Case in point: if a command isn't bound to a key it doesn't show up in
> help, so there is this pressure to bind everything that could possibly
> be useful to some person some day to some key. What if instead help
> showed all the interactive commands provided by the mode? What if M-x
> were smarter about highlighting mode specific commands?
>
> Perhaps exploring these kinds of ideas would be useful.

The mechanism you’re describing is called a menu.

Case in point: In almost every GUI program that follows the CUA
guidelines, you can invoke the File | Open command by pressing Alt+F
O. In some TUI programs you cannot use Alt+<letter> to open a
first-level menu, but you can do like F9 O C for Options |
Configuration. In Emacs, however, the actual GTK menu does not support
this kind of usage. (‘tmm-menubar’ does.)