Re: Proposal: new default bindings for winner and windmove

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, Stefan and Stefan.

On Fri, Jun 21, 2024 at 15:39:09 -0500, Stefan Kangas wrote:
> Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

> > A few years ago, Daniel suggested:
> >> Likewise, for windmove, we can bind C-x 4 {left, right, up, down} and DWIM
> >> for people automatically, enabled by default.
> >
> > AFAICT we still don't actually provide any keybindings for the windmove
> > commands by default.  Did I miss a controversy about that, or did it
> > just fall through the cracks?

> FWIW, I don't remember any controversy either, so my guess is that it
> just fell through the cracks.

I would be against using C-x 4 <arrow keys> or C-x 5 <arrow-keys> for
windmove (or anything else) by default.  Key sequences with arrow keys
are too few, and too precious, to use for anything not critically
important.

windmove is not critically important.  Either it isn't used at all by a
user (likely most users), or it is used all the time (by a small number
of users).  In the latter case, the user will already have bound the
commands to key sequences, since they are not useful called from M-x.

It wasn't so long ago that we were removing default key bindings so as
to free them up for other uses.  I don't think there's any reason to
reverse that policy for windmove.  It just isn't important enough.

There will be users who've bound these key bindings for their own uses.
Let's not mess these users around.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).