Re: Proposal: new default bindings for winner and windmove

[Stefan Kangas]

Generally speaking, we provide an extensive set of keybindings.  These
defaults ensure that Emacs is as usable as possible out-of-the-box.

There is of course room for reasonable people to agree or disagree to
what extent this or that keybinding is useful enough to provide
out-of-the-box; this is largely a matter of taste and how you use Emacs.

However, I'm not convinced by the argument that there is some
"keybinding real estate" that we are somehow occupying by adding _any_
new defaults, since users can change keybindings relatively easily.
So there is no way around the need to consider each new proposal
individually.

Now, it is clear that there is a need for users to navigate between
windows.  The need for even more specialized commands (e.g. windmove,
ace-window) is arguably bigger today than it used to be.  Users will
routinely have huge monitors where they can have a large number of
windows visible at the same time.  What served users in 1995 will not
necessarily be enough for the needs of users today.

In my view, having considered this discussion in full, the benefits of
adding these key bindings, favored by several developers, therefore
outweigh the perceived drawbacks.

- The proposal is to add global bindings, which AFAIU means that they
  will not affect people that are binding these keys to something else
  (whether globally or in specific modes).

- People that do not like these keys do not need to use them, or they
  can unbind them, or rebind them to something else.

- The relevant windmove commands are already autoloaded.

- There is no need to deprecate anything to add these bindings.

Thus, I don't think I see any compelling reason not to go ahead with
this change.  I would propose that we now start discussing the specifics
of how to go about doing that (patches, proposed alternative solutions).