Re: Suggested experimental test

[Gregory Heytings]

> The difference is that 37 years have passed, and what was then a recent 
> keybinding in a program that had only a very limited user base is now a 
> keybinding many users have hardwired into their muscles.
>
> Another thing that changed is that there are nowadays many more active 
> contributors to Emacs who have their own (and different!) views on this 
> subject.  See below.  It was easy to make such decisions when Emacs was 
> an RCS repository on Richard's own machine, and he was the only one who 
> actually made changes.
>
> Yet another thing that's changed is that we nowadays have much fewer 
> free keys to work with, and many of those, while unbound globally, are 
> likely to be bound by some mode which is dear to someone.  Part of the 
> reasons for the differences in opinions is that different people use 
> different modes and have different usage patterns, and thus keybinding 
> that are important to some might be unimportant (or even unknown, as 
> these discussions repeatedly show!) to others.  How can we ever 
> significantly agree on removing or changing a keybinding under these 
> circumstances?

I see your points, but all this is rather sad, because it means that Emacs 
is forever locked by what looks very much like a historical accident.

> And one more thought, regarding the problem that 3rd-party packages 
> have: it can be argued that this is not our problem.  Why should users 
> of Emacs that never heard of package P and will likely never use it pay 
> the price? why couldn't the developers of P solve the problem which is 
> in a way caused by P and whose solution benefits the users of P?  Some 
> might think that shifting the price to the Emacs core is the wrong way 
> of dealing with the problem.  The solution could be for P to use longer 
> key sequences (which usurps fewer keys on the top level), and if some 
> users of P are unhappy about that, then those users could rebind the 
> commands privately to any key they like.  Think about it.

I'm not sure if the above ("this is not our problem") is your opinion, or 
if you just present a possible viewpoint you do not necessarily share. 
This has been discussed to death already, and (as you already know) IMO it 
is a problem that will have to be solved by Emacs itself, sooner or later. 
It does not apply to a single package P, or only to a few packages.

Just type emacs -Q, M-x list-packages RET, RET.  The package you now see 
('ace-window') asks you to fiddle with your init file by adding a 
'global-set-key' to it.  The second package in the list ('ack') does the 
same.  And so forth.  That's not a problem for you and me, it is a problem 
for newcomers, and these 'global-set-key's should be done automatically, 
during the installation process.  Do you know any other software that asks 
you to change a configuration file manually to use an extension package?

As the author of Magit wrote when he added the "C-x g" global binding:

"Some [...] beginners will initially have a low threshold for things not 
working out of the box and I don't want to (continue to) scare them off by 
immediately forcing them to learn how to add key bindings and what that 
even means.  There's a lot of talk about making Emacs friendlier for 
beginners and this is a small step in that direction." [1]

[1] https://github.com/magit/magit/pull/4237#issuecomment-723495053