Re: Emacs Language Sensitive Editing

[David Bolen <db3l@fitlinxx.com>]

Stephen Leake <stephen.a.leake.1@gsfc.nasa.gov> writes:

> Actually, the default Emacs keystrokes only require the control key
> and the ASCII keys. They were specifically designed to not require
> modification on _any_ system; they work over telnet, for example.

I'm not sure I quite agree - there's lots of relatively core
functionality even in a default Emacs configuration that really needs
the Meta key.  For example, you can move around a character at time
with Ctrl sequences, but if you want to move by words you need to
involve Meta.  Not to mention that M-x is a pretty major prefix for
entering in any particular command.

But that doesn't mean you need a dedicated key, since any Meta-xx
sequence can be typed as two keystrokes with ESC - serving as a
virtual Meta-shift - and xx, and except maybe for some IBM terminals,
ESC is pretty much on any keyboard anyone is likely to use (albeit as
someone else mentioned, on some DEC keyboards it masqueraded as F11).
And it works fine over any remote protocols, since it's just a
standard individual ASCII code.

This is in large part because the original systems in use during the
first developments of Emacs did have dedicated META keys.

In fact, I've never gotten in the habit of actually using whatever key
on a system serves as the Meta key (at least in terms of using it as a
shift-like key like Ctrl), probably because the earliest systems I
used Emacs on didn't have one.  So instead I just always use ESC first
for such commands, and that's proven portable with no relearning (or
retraining fingers) on every system I've used over the past 15+ years.

--
-- David
-- 
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