On Thu, 2 Jul 2009 05:04:14 +0200 Uriel <urie...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I have a weird love-hate relationship with keybindings in Emacs. That > > is, I wish they were slightly more Unix-ized instead of whatever > > arbitrary junk they decided on back in the ITS days. Ctrl-U should > > delete from your cursor to the start of the line, and Ctrl-H should do > > a backspace, not open Help! > > I have been so annoyed by how various programs mess up the traditional > Unix text editing keyboard shortcuts that I have started to document > how to bring them back: > > http://unix-kb.cat-v.org > > I specially hate the trend to map ^W to closing the current window, > I'm happily editing some text, make a typo or change my mind about the > last word, press ^W, and pooff, all my work is gone. > *arrrrrrrrrggggggg*.
Trend? It's *the* way forward for the shiny sexy pretty Freedesktop.org era!!! I was almost sure it came from Windows, but a: I was on my nephew's XP box the other day & found it didn't work anymore if it ever did, and b: last I tried OS X Command-W closes windows there, which kinda corresponds to ctrl-W except for the little detail of not messing up emacs & foo. (See why I can't quite stop liking OS X? In these little things it's saner than anything built on Linux in the last 5-10 years.) > > Anyway, hope people finds it useful, and please send me any extra info > on how to implement/configure/restore the standard Unix behavior in > any other environments and apps. > > I also would be interested in hearing more details on the exact > origins of ^H ^W and ^U. ^H goes back to ASCII if not before, it's the ASCII control code for backspace. I briefly used a text editor that emulated WordStar. ^W was the way to kill a word on that. I suspect more bindings go back to WordStar, not sure. ^U I have no idea about. > > Now back to your usual 9fans schedule, enjoy your keyboard vs. mouse flame > > uriel > > P.S.: I even recently wrote a Google Chrome extension to implement the > Unix text editing keyboard shortcuts in web pages, it works fairly > well so far: http://repo.cat-v.org/burning_chrome/hosaka/ next task is > implementing acme-like mouse chording ;) > > > The ^H problem is especially annoying on > > my Slackware box, where I apparently can't hit the Backspace key in > > console-mode Emacs or else I'll open the help window. Still, emacs > > makes for a decent dev environment (it's where I write most of my Unix > > code) and if I ever got motivated enough, it's nice that it has a > > fully-featured Lisp environment for extending stuff. > > > > > > John > > -- > > "I've tried programming Ruby on Rails, following TechCrunch in my RSS > > reader, and drinking absinthe. It doesn't work. I'm going back to C, > > Hunter S. Thompson, and cheap whiskey." -- Ted Dziuba > > > > > -- Ethan Grammatikidis Those who are slower at parsing information must necessarily be faster at problem-solving.
