Re: [External] : Re: Concern about new binding.

[Jean Louis]

* Karl Fogel <kfogel@red-bean.com> [2021-02-06 02:39]:
> On 05 Feb 2021, Jose A. Ortega Ruiz wrote:
> > I honestly don't understand this reasoning.  Please bear with me. Say
> > today you have C-x g bound to a favourite command of yours. How would
> > emacs 28 binding it by default to revert-buffer interfere with your
> > emacs usage?  Would that limit you in any way?  Chances are you won't
> > even notice (if you're setting it unconditionally in your init.el).   By
> > contrast, by our prohibiting binding any subset of keys to anything at
> > all, users who don't (or can't) customize their emacses will never have
> > any use for those "free" bindings, and will never have a more convenient
> > way of accessing, say, revert-buffer.   How are we making user's lives
> > more convenient by prohibiting to emacs maintainers (or library writers,
> > for that matter) to use any currently unbound slot for a new binding?
> 
> Ah, I can answer this.  It has to do with protecting investment.
> 
> When I custom-bind a command to a key, I am making an investment in finger
> memory.  For example, I have `revert-buffer' on `C-c r' (because I use
> `revert-buffer' a lot), and I chose `C-c r' precisely because it was in the
> reserved space for user-chosen keybindings.  That way I could be sure Emacs
> would never bind some other useful new function there.

I was thinking same as you some time before until somebody on Help GNU
Emacs mailing list has shown me how person uses the prefix key.

Then I have switched my mental model of remembering the whole key on
just remembering the key coming after the prefix. Instead of {s-p p} I
would remember just that prefix is s-p and key is p separated from
each other. Now that what people call "muscle memory" has separate
slots, one for prefix and one for keys there after. If I change prefix
to {C-i i} or {C-p} now I can do whatever comes there after like {C-i
i p} or {C-p p} instead of {s-p p} without problems. I have now about
15 keys after the s-p prefix, but changing prefix would not disturb me
due to the expansion of the slots in my muscle memory. ;-)

> Every such decision (to move a default Emacs keybinding to somewhere else)
> will cause me to diverge a bit further from default Emacs, and that
> divergence has overhead costs.

Exactly. The cost on global users is much. I can imagine plethora of
bugs files in Debian GNU/Linux and other GNU/Linux distributions,
questions on Reddit and other sites where people try to find their old
default key binding. Changing very default key bindings causes more
than just a butterfly effect.

But there are those others default key bindings that are not very
defaults. Like M-z that I could not found in use in Emacs-like
editors, it was not considered important to implement it in Zile, e3,
mg.

Jean