[kepler-dev] Bring to Front vs Move to first menu choice

[Bertram Ludaescher]

Edward:

I agree that the keyboard bindings of emacs can be (literally) painful.
However I attribute this mostly (or in great part) to today's keyboards.
When I learned emacs many years ago on a Sun-keyboard, the ctrl and meta
keys were very conveniently located (and the most used ctrl key was also
oversized just like Shift today). And indeed it was a bit difficult for
me to switch from a Sun keyboard to a PC keyboard where the ctrl key has
been moved away from the action (not to mention the meta key)...  
At some point I had changed the keyboard mappings (e.g., on my thinkpad,
the CapsLock would make a great Ctrl key). The downside is that when you
start using someone else's keyboard you won't feel at home anymore (but
who ever does with another keyboard anywayse ..)

But what is nice about the emacs bindings is that they tried to be
consistent to the extent possible (doesn't always work with hundreds or
thousands of functions). 
Here is an example (same with 'b' for backward etc.): 

C-f	forward-character (some people calls this "cursor-right" ;-)
M-f     forward-word 
M-C-f   forward-sexp (syntactic expression)

The latter is of course mode-specific, i.e., in lisp mode the editor
understands lisp expressions and you can jump over them, in Latex mode
it understands Latex expressions, in Java mode, Java expressions
etc. (at least one would hope).

Not everyone's cup of tea, but a fine taste anyways .
But we need to get those keyboards back.. see also: 
http://www.johnbear.net/symbolics-keyboard-paper/gnu-emacs-kbd-for-mac3.html
and his discussion on sexp (syntactic expressions.. I wonder whether the
spam filter will get this..).

Bertram


>>> On Tue, 20 Dec 2005 18:16:50 -0800
>>> "Edward A. Lee" <eal at eecs.berkeley.edu> wrote: 
EAL> 
EAL> Let's make it $0.04:
EAL> 
EAL> I used emacs intensively for about 4 years, at the end of which
EAL> my hands were almost entirely incapacitated by RSI.  I doubt that
EAL> emacs was the only cause, but I do think it was a major contributor...
EAL> These key bindings require putting your hands in very awkward positions,
EAL> and also use the weakest fingers far more than the strongest ones
EAL> (meta, ctrl, and shift all use the weakest fingers).
EAL> 
EAL> So I'm not fond of emacs bindings...
EAL> 
EAL> Edward