Re: Experimentally unbind M-o on the trunk

[Matt Armstrong]

Yuri Khan <yuri.v.khan@gmail.com> writes:

> 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.

Yes, in concept. I'm not sure it is clear how to use the classic GUI
menu mechanism to expose all possible useful Emacs interactive commands
in a given context.

I do keep the Emacs menu on, and lean on it to discover what a package
can do, expecially in packages I use infrequently. It tends to be good
at surfacing the basic commands, but not great at the power user stuff.

> 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.)

I think menus in the typical GUI sense have and even more severe issue
with limited space than key bindings do. Emacs' file menu includes
find-file, yet Emacs' key bindings expose all of these variants:

   C-x C-f         find-file
   C-x C-r         find-file-read-only
   C-x 4 f         find-file-other-window
   C-x 4 r         find-file-read-only-other-window
   C-x 5 f         find-file-other-frame
   C-x 5 r         find-file-read-only-other-frame
   C-x t f         find-file-other-tab
   C-x C-v         find-alternate-file