Re: Proposal: new default bindings for winner and windmove

[Po Lu]

Daniel Colascione <dancol@dancol.org> writes:

> So? Nobody is preventing those users doing what they want with their
> key bindings.  You're making a general purpose argument against having
> default key bindings at all. Why don't we just ship Emacs with an
> empty global keymap so we're not imposing on anyone?

Replace "having" with "introducing" and you should find that this line
of argument is generally sound.  After all these years, all the commands
that justify being bound by default have already received bindings in
the default keymaps, and plenty of commands that are well in excess of
this criterion.

> Metrics with nontrivial opt-in suffer from selection bias. The sort of
> person who goes out of his way to enable telemetry is the sort of
> person who's going to do more customization than the average user.

Yes.  That does not render mandatory collection of metrics any the less
morally objectionable in a computer program, nor imposing arbitrary
changes on users any more reasonable.

> So? How does providing default windmove bindings make your life worse?

I have bound C-x 4 <down> to ffap-other-window, C-x 4 i to
ibuffer-other-window, and the remaining arrow keys to other commands
that fall into the same -other-window scheme.  I trust there is a
multitude of users besides Alan and myself with their own purposes for
these keys.

> They're not convenient for anyone if left unbound. 

Scarce are the keys that are not bound by default, and therefore may be
customized by users without risking departures in their Emacs sessions
from the expectations of users trained and pastured on uncustomized
sessions.  This is just one, and by far not the most compelling, of many
objections to introducing new default keybindings, but one of which a
recent example comes to mind: C-x x u has for many years been bound in
my sessions to a command that deletes a buffer's undo list, usually in
the interests of security.  The consequences of a stranger's
unsuspectingly typing the same to invoke rename-uniquely might easily
have been catastrophic.