Re: [Nano-devel] unbinding/reassigning two or three keys

[Chris Allegretta]

Hey Benno, I assume this is for 2.5 series you are talking about.
Default keybindings are of course not something I think we should be
changing in the stable series.

You raise a lot of topics here, I'll try and respond to each.

I strongly encourage people to chime in here, I think we all have
certain keystrokes we each are used to for finger memory.

On 4/9/15, Benno Schulenberg <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Mar 30, 2015, at 12:50, Benno Schulenberg wrote:
>> I find it strange that the toggle M-F is available in the main
>> menu when it is really only needed and relevant in the ^R Read File
>> menu.   The same goes for the M-B toggle, that is only relevant in the
>> ^O Write Out menu.  Conversely, a toggle that would be useful to have
>> in the main menu -- make M-W search backwards -- is only available
>> in the ^W Where Is menu.  Any chance that we could sacrifice the
>> current M-F and M-B and reassign M-B to Backwards?

On the topic of what's finger memory: I tend to use M-F right from the
main menu personally, it's just finger memory for me at this point to
type M-F,^R.

M-B I also use from the main menu but am fine with using it just from
the WriteOut menu.

I think changing M-W is probably not a great idea at this point: it's
already been changed once (it used to do what M-L does now), and it
does make sense that since ^W is a search function that M-W also is.

> But then... personally I would prefer to have a search-next-forward and
> a search-next-backward function instead of a single search function with
> a toggle.  Then I could bind M-W to find-next-forward, and M-B to find-
> -next-backward -- although, that is a bit unintuitive, keypositionwise,
> so I would probably bind find-next-forward to M-N.
>
> Which brings us to M-N, the No-convert toggle.  Is it needed in the main
> menu?  And why is it not present in the Read File menu?  Any objections
> against removing it from the first and adding it to the second?

M-N I also never use anymore and I think its function is quite
antiquated, so it could probably be repurposed.  But....

In the general case I think while nano may be inconsistent, people
have been using it for many years or even decades - there are some key
bindings which I think are just bad (e.g. ^w introduces bad finger
memory for people using web browsers) but they have been around since
Pico, so we're out of luck in some cases.  The philosophy behind nano
has been to add on to what Pico originally did but add on where we
could grow (e.g. meta key conbinarions).  Now we have to deal with the
longevity of nano itself as it's now been around for more than 15
years.

The meta issue here is that we've given people the ability to
customize a lot of this to their liking already, and changing the
default keys may cause even more need for people to rebind to get back
to what they're used to or at least expect.  Unfortunately, a lack of
response on this thread doesn't mean that there are not scores of
users who wouldn't want us messing with the key binding for X feature;
they just don't subscribe to this list or follow nano development
closely enough as they are happy with it as-is. Such changes could
take a year or several to find its way onto the operating system
they're using today and then could be hard to undo.  The feedback
mechanism is not very tight here so the risk is high of an unexpected
adverse response some time later.

To give a personal example, I always switch line wrap toggle back to
M-W on systems I'm using; this change happened many years ago and yet
it's taken me until very recently to get used to the new behavior.  I
think that the core developers rebind their keys speaks to the issue
that probably it's impossible to please everyone here and we probably
want to focus our efforts on making the rebinding system as flexbile
as possible.  I'm also reminded  of the gentleman who emailed us
recently because of how the file conversion options changed.  People
get very used to specific flags and keystrokes doing a specific thing.

I don't think changing default keybindings is going to win us a lot of
extra users but it certainly risks alienating some.  Honestly I think
we should tread lightly here.  Potentially engage some of our
followers on facebook or twitter about this discussion and see what
they think (if you use either of these platforms) - or if you don't
perhaps put up a poll and email info-nano about it.