Emacs bindings, an unfinished project

Emacs bindings, an unfinished project

[Bart Schaefer]

A few weeks ago there was a discussion of how various keybindings in zsh's
"emacs" keymap don't really correspond very well to emacs itself.  This is
of course true for a variety of reasons, including preservation of the old
BSD TTY driver behavior and the zsh authors' personal preferences.

At one point some [long] while ago I fired up emacs with only its default
set of bindings, dumped a list of them, and set out to emulate them all in
zsh -- a task which I quickly discovered to be impossible, at the time.  In
fact, it's still impossible, because emacs has multiple editor buffers and
a completely different approach to keymaps -- but recent additions to zsh
have made it possible to get closer.

I therefore cleaned up the file a bit and added some new examples using zsh
4.2.x features.  It's still largely unfinished, but in the interests of
getting more eyes and fingers involved I've put it up on the web:

	http://www.well.com/user/barts/zsh/emacs-emu

See comments at the top of the file for minimalist usage instructions.

One of the things that this illustrates is how fragile some widgets, like
execute-named-command, are in the face of changes to bindings in the main
keymap.  More about this can be read on zsh-workers.