[Nano-devel] RFC: changing the bindings of <Alt+Up> and <Alt+Down> to scrolling per line

[Benno Schulenberg]

Hi all,

A year and a half ago, I chose to hard-bind <Alt+Up> to findprevious
and <Alt+Down> to findnext [1].  At the time it seemed like a good idea
to give those two search functions a binding by default.  But a year
later, those functions also got bound to M-Q and M-W [2], making the
Alt+arrow bindings kind of superfluous.

The thing is, since the line-scrolling functions were modified to keep
the cursor position unchanged (whenever possible) I have started to use
them much more and now find it awkward that they are bound to M-- and M-=,
four rows away from the arrow keys on my laptop.  When I am somewhere in
the middle of the screen and want to see a few more lines of something
that starts near the bottom of the screen, I have to reach "all the way
up" to M-= to achieve that -- the default place of my right fingers is
on the arrow keys.  So, at least for me,' it would be really handy if
the arrow keys could somehow do the scrolling per line.

So, that is what I propose: to hard-bind <Alt+Up> to scrollup and
<Alt+Down> to scrolldown.  I have been running that change locally
for a while, and I like it.  See the upcoming patch.

What are your opinions on this?

(An additional reason is that I've never used <Alt+Up> and <Alt+Down> to
find a previous or next occurrence of the search string -- but that was
probably because locally I've always had M-Q bound to findprevious.)

[1] http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/nano.git/commit/?id=45624015
[2] http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/nano.git/commit/?id=bfe65af6
[3] http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/nano.git/commit/?id=0e30177d

Benno

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