Emacs - total keybinding remap - tips, consequences, and extensions

Question

I would like to totally remap keybindings of Emacs. I would like to know helpful inforrmations about its pros and cons, some tips.

There are some things of particular interest:

How it influences other extensions/modes?
Are there any tools that could make remaping simpler, to see inter-dependencies between extensions...?

What do you mean by "totally remap"? For which mode? What exactly do you want to accomplish? — Noufal Ibrahim, Nov 22 '11 at 18:37

huaiyuan · Accepted Answer · 2011-11-28T11:47:42.720

5

Consider defining a minor mode with its own keymap, and isolating your remapping to that one place. Compared to clobbering the global-map, it's more flexible and easier to test: you can enable and disable your set of bindings by toggling the mode dynamically without restarting; or enable it conditionally only for certain major modes. Keys defined in minor-mode will override major-mode specific bindings, though, which may or may not be what you want.

See 23.3.3 Defining Minor Modes.

edited Nov 28 '11 at 11:47

answered Nov 22 '11 at 20:12

huaiyuan

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i.e. this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/683425/globally-override-key-binding-in-emacs/683575#683575 – scottfrazer Nov 23 '11 at 12:45

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 22 '11 at 19:19

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You might want to look at some of the documentation and discussions relating to a similar project, ErgoEmacs.

answered Nov 22 '11 at 19:19

sanityinc

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score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 22 '11 at 19:46

I think the cons will outway the pros. Many Emacs beginners react negatively to the default keybindings, and immediately set about changing them to their preferences. This introduces problems, as common usage patterns that you find in the docs and in third-party blogs/tutorials will need to be translated into your personal setup, which introduces another learning barrier for you to deal with.

Other problems may accumulate as you discover that bindings you changed in the first week conflict with features you discover months later. Now you have to re-rebind the keys and re-relearn the new bindings, or find different bindings for the new features.

I think you will be better off in the long run if you persevere with the defaults for a while, and then slowly rebind things as you gain experience. That will make it less likely that your modifications will have bad interactions later on.

Note that I am all in favor of customizing your key bindings, extensively if you like. However, I think that's a bad place to start learning Emacs.

If my argument doesn't convince you, then ergoemacs mentioned by sanityinc is one place to look for a contrasting view, as is the Emacs starter kit.

Emacs - total keybinding remap - tips, consequences, and extensions

3 Answers3