Re: PROPOSAL: Repurpose one key (why only one?) and reserve it for third-party packages

[Philip Kaludercic]

Gregory Heytings <gregory@heytings.org> writes:

>>
>> So I get that there might not be that many commands, but I'd dare to
>> claim that 52 keys are a fair number. This is not a matter of 
>> computational power or memory, the needs are not increasing
>> exponentially over time.
>>
>> [...]
>>
>> Maybe it is just me, but it would surprise me if people would keep
>> 52 distinct commands in memory, which all have to be bound globally
>> and are easy to type. Not insisting on this though.
>
> On Elpa and Melpa there are currently 5121 distinct packages.  And
> there are lots of packages that are not on Elpa and/or Melpa.  That
> number can only grow over time, perhaps not exponentially, but grow
> nonetheless. Emacs itself has lots and lots of commands bound to keys,
> I don't know the exact number, but it's surely an order of magniture
> larger than 52. "Starter kits" such as Spacemacs include 100 or more
> external packages. Or course not all of them would have a reason to
> bind command globally, but some will bind more than one command.  So
> it seems to me that the 52 keys limit is easy to reach.

I'm not sure that the number of published packages necessarily means
that 1. user install more packages over time 2. some fixed proportion of
these require global bindings. More often than not, packages might just
provide hooks or implement interfaces like Xref or CAPF, thus avoiding
their own special keys.

> I agree with Drew that the solution you propose is not user-friendly,
> because querying a user who doesn't yet know how a package works and
> what its commands are to bind some commands they do not yet know to a
> key is confusing.  What users would most likely do is to answer "yes"
> everywhere without thinking further.  (It reminds me what Windows
> program installers did when I started using computers, about 25 years
> ago.  They asked you a few questions, I don't remember precisely what
> they were, but it was something like "where do you want to install the
> program?", "do you want to put a shortcut on the desktop?", "do you
> want to put a shortcut in the start menu?".  You read those questions
> when you installed your first program, because you thought they were
> important, but later you just clicked "yes" to every question.)

That is why ideally each suggestion should be accompanied by an
explanation, and keep the number of suggestions to a minimum. But this
can be discussed when I come around to actually implementing the idea,
and sending it to emacs-devel.

-- 
        Philip K.

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