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Re: not good proposal: "C-z <letter>" reserved for users


From: Gregory Heytings
Subject: Re: not good proposal: "C-z <letter>" reserved for users
Date: Thu, 11 Feb 2021 13:15:41 +0000



Basically, I don't see a problem here that couldn't be solved much more easily by updating the keybinding conventions to say that external packages should not create any global bindings by default.


IMO that would be the worst possible solution, and would be an extremely negative signal towards third-party library developers. Do you remember that Emacs is an _extensible_ editor? See https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html .

Why shouldn't an extension package for a general-purpose editor (not necessarily Emacs, think Atom or Sublime or...) change the user interface of that editor when it is installed?


Reserving keys for external packages means that Emacs needs some way to deal with conflicting external key bindings, which will inevitably arise.


Yes, and this has been acknowledged from the outset. It's a different problem however, these are conflicts between external packages, not between an external package and Emacs core or between an external package and users' personal bindings. And, as you yourself say, these conflicts can be handled by specific functions, in a user-friendly way. It can also be expected that best practices will arise by themselves, like "using as few keys as possible", "using a keymap on a single key if possible", "not using the same keys as an existing major package", "use the 4 key for commands in other-window and the 5 key for commands in other-frame", ...



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