Re: $ collision

[Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>]

Richard Riley <rileyrg@googlemail.com> writes:

> I guess this is where I am getting confused. Esc is the meta here or I
> have certainly always thought of it as that .. but that to one side for
> a moment : the rest of the emacs driving keys use M so do you redefine all
> those or just use Esc as the Meta?

I use ESC as meta, but most meta sequences in Emacs don't have to be
repeated multiple times.  The only other one I ever remember noticing this
with is M-v, and I don't use that anywhere near as much as marking
messages as spam.  In order to have M-d be a single shifted keystroke,
there has to be a shift key on the keyboard that can successfully act as
the meta shift key (not the ESC prefix workaround), which is true in X but
not (for me at least) in an xterm through ssh to emacs -nw on the other
side.

If one is marking multiple messages as spam, it's much more annoying to
have to alternate between two keys (and ESC is often in an awkward
location) than to just repeatedly use the same key, possibly shifted.

> Don't misunderstand me, I'm not objecting per-se to anything I am just
> trying to understand why existing keys that people use for Mairix are
> remapped to add a facility key to something already mapped.

I've never even heard if nnmairix before the last month and certainly
wasn't aware of it when I proposed the additional key binding, and I
suspect Lars wasn't aware either.

I don't use it and therefore don't particularly care; I can continue to
locally map $ to the right thing since I don't use nnmairix.  But it
seemed like it would make mark handling more consistent.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>