Re: [9fans] Guide to using Acme effectively?

[Ethan Grammatikidis <eekee57@fastmail.fm>]

On Thu, 2 Jul 2009 05:04:14 +0200
Uriel <uriel99@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.