Emacs bindings

Posted Jun 16, 2011 2:18 UTC (Thu) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)
In reply to: Emacs bindings by corbet
Parent article: GNOME Shell, extensions, and control

I think the behaviour's always been tied to the standard GTK text entry widgets. My recollection is that the functionality appeared pretty early in Gnome 2 (possibly even in 2.0), and as time passed the conflict between applications and the widgets became more commonplace. Once the option was downgraded to a config file rather than a visible UI, my suspicion is that people writing custom widgets no longer duplicated the behaviour.

I actually lobbied in favour of the UI for it being removed a few years ago. Nobody had come up with any rational way of handling the conflicts between applications and the keybindings (and just telling application authors that they can't use about half of the normal keybindings because 1% of users have enabled this option that makes them do different things instead isn't likely to work that well...) and I think it's better to not have an option than to have an option that works some of the time and can cause data loss in other situations. I still think this was the right choice.

And, honestly, I haven't found this to be a significant issue. It took very little time for me to transition from using emacs key bindings to using the ctrl/shift/cursor/backspace shortcuts instead. screen already eats all my ctrl+as. The only one I'm really missing is ctrl+t, but there's many terminal apps that implement most of the emacs bindings without that anyway...

Emacs bindings

Posted Jun 17, 2011 10:27 UTC (Fri) by wookey (guest, #5501) [Link] (7 responses)

ctrl-U is the one I really miss. Being able to clear the browser address line without losing the selection (which is already the URL you want) is really useful. I guess the problem has been reduced by the way that many apps (especially xterms) make the URLs clickable now, which does the same job, but I still miss it regularly, and search out the magic runes for 'make ctrl-U work' every time I install new distro. It's more obscure every time. I really resent whoever thought that 'view source' was more important than 'clear current URL'

Emacs bindings

Posted Jun 17, 2011 19:09 UTC (Fri) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link] (5 responses)

It would be nice if the emacs key bindings could continue to exist in GTK, but using some other key than "control." For example, the windows key is virtually unused and right next to the control key. I don't even know one application-- not one-- that uses the windows key for anything.

So we could continue to have these highly useful shortcuts enabled at all times, without conflicting with the keybindings set up by the application. This would also resolve annoyances like when I get used to the shell's control-W behavior, and type control-W in the browser.

Emacs bindings

Posted Jun 17, 2011 19:16 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (1 responses)

The Windows key is used to pop up the overview window in Gnome Shell, which makes it more problematic for shortcuts.

Emacs bindings

Posted Jun 17, 2011 21:06 UTC (Fri) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link]

In that case, Gnome Shell users could use the menu key.

This seems like the sort of thing where a GTK option would be entirely appropriate. Applications will never define anything to conflict with these keys, so a global setting would be easy to implement.

Emacs bindings

Posted Jun 17, 2011 20:33 UTC (Fri) by jnh (subscriber, #69758) [Link]

Folks keep saying that they [custom key bindings] create conflicts with the application but that's really not entirely true. GTK+ bindings are done at a widet level, they're really very flexible. The need to override the key bindings for entry widgets in an application isn't that common. Providing shortcuts and special keys for particular tasks can still be done, it all comes down to an issue of focus.

Emacs bindings

Posted Jun 17, 2011 22:21 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

KDE, at least when I used it, tended to use the meta key for global bindings (e.g., multimedia controls with Amarok).

Emacs bindings

Posted Jul 21, 2011 0:16 UTC (Thu) by bjartur (guest, #67801) [Link]

Songbird also does that on Windows (or did before my father's computer became a CD-ROM Linux MintÍs box).

Emacs bindings

Posted Jun 20, 2011 13:39 UTC (Mon) by james (subscriber, #1325) [Link]

For me, alt-D selects the address line, but doesn't replace the X selection (Firefox 4 on Fedora 15, but I'm sure it worked before). So alt-D, followed either by backspace or delete, will leave the address line blank for you to centre-click your URL into.