Re: PROPOSAL: Repurpose one key and reserve it for third-party packages

[Robert Thorpe]

"Philip K." <philipk@posteo.net> writes:

> [1:text/plain Hide]
>
> Gregory Heytings <gregory@heytings.org> writes:
>
...
>> That reminds me the famous "640 kb should be enough for anyone" ;-)
>> Indeed, 26 letters is not enough.  Magit has three global commands, 
>> Org-mode has three, and Bookmark+ has three keymaps.  With just three
>> packages you've already used 35% of the available keys.  I hope you 
>> understand that it can't be a long-term solution.  Moreover, AFAIU,
>> packages cannot automatically bind their commands to C-c LETTER keys 
>> anyway: these keys are strictly reserved for users in their personal
>> configuration files.
>
> I think that's the pessimistic way to look at it, the optimistic one
> would be to say that you only need 35% of the key-space. I don't have a
> feeling for how many global keys people bind by default, one would have
> to study public configurations to find out. But I still remain sceptical
> that -- compared to memory usage -- that need for keys is rising that
> much.

Remember prefix keys here.  A user can define a prefix key anywhere in
the region reserved for users.

The manual says:

"A small number of keys are reserved for user-defined bindings, and
should not be used by modes, so key bindings using those keys are safer
in this regard.  The reserved key sequences are those consisting of
‘C-c’ followed by a letter (either upper or lower case), and function
keys <F5> through <F9> without modifiers (*note Modifier Keys::)."

It does not ban using those keys as prefixes.  I can make <F9> a prefix,
then I have the full keyboard to play with once again once I've pressed
F9.

BR,
Robert Thorpe