Re: Keybinding styles (was: [External] : Re: Gitlab Migration)

[John Yates]

On Mon, Sep 6, 2021 at 11:16 PM Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:
>
>   > As a first step towards Stefan's wish, might I suggest that we
>   > consider what it would take to move to a world in which other
>   > binding schemes are considered fully equal peers of our current
>   > default bindings?
>
> If "fully equal peers" means that we give them as much support to each
> of them as we do to the Emacs key bindings, we shouldn't.  It would be
> an enormous amount of work, and not worth it.  We won't urge people to
> make a version of the Emacs Manual that uses a different set of key
> bindings, nor to update it for each Emacs version.
>
> It's reasonable to support selecting other sets of key bindings,
> but the implementing them and supporting them will have to be up
> to whoever likes each one.

I did not suggest that we do any work specifically to support
any specific alternative set of key bindings.  What I attempted
to suggest is trying to understand the experience of someone
adopting Emacs from the outset with evil-mode or some other
alternative set of key bindings enabled.  To what extent can
that user be made to feel other than a second class member
of our community?  Can the user experience when perusing
documentation be either in terms of neutral function names
or, when key bindings must be mentioned, then in terms of
that user's elected bindings?

The implication was, until we accept at a cultural level, that
other sets of bindings should not be disadvantaged, we are
unlikely to make progress toward Stefan's stated wish:

> I keep wishing someone came up with a clever way for modes to specify
> their key-bindings in such a way that Emacs can automatically derive from
> it the keys to use "normally" as well as the keys to use in Evil or the
> keys to use in god-mode, or the keys to use in this hypothetical new
> `really-cua-mode`, ...
> So as to finally address this long-term maintenance challenge.

/john