Re: Bikeshedding go! Why is <M-f4> unbound?

[PJ Weisberg]

On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 9:12 AM, Drew Adams <address@hidden> wrote:
>> If a key has a meaning in the environment, even a non-standard
>> meaning, users might *expect* the key to keep that meaning even
>> when the great and powerful Emacs has keyboard focus.
>
> Understood.  But the same expectation is equally unmet if the key is defined
> locally by Emacs.  That part is nothing new.

Yeah, but in the case where it has it's own action I don't see myself
shouting at the screen "It IS defined, goddammit!"  and searching
Google for phrases like "emacs fix undefined key".  ;-)

> Emacs can and does change the behavior of some outside keys locally.  In the
> case of a few keys it does not on some platforms - typically cannot, IIUC.
>
> Emacs is a local environment, and one that pretty much (i.e., with exceptions)
> can give you info about any key.
>
> At the very least (and it seems most are agreed about this), an Emacs user 
> needs
> to be able to ask `C-h k' and learn that a given key is (a) defined as Emacs
> command `foo', (b) passed-through to Windows, or (c) undefined.

I just wonder if it should be (d) undefined, and therefore passed
through to <Windows, or any other window-manager that expects to
receive key events *after* an application processes them instead of
before>.

If I discovered that Emacs overrode a beloved keybinding with some
command I didn't care about, probably the first thing I would try
would be global-unset-key.  In my .emacs file I use (define-key foo
foo nil) to get rid of some bindings in enriched-mode-map that I don't
like, allowing them to fall back to their global bindings, and I would
envision this working the same way.

It's possible that I'm trying to think like a non-existent person (a
typical Windows user who runs Emacs).

-PJ