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


From: Gregory Heytings
Subject: Re: PROPOSAL: Repurpose one key (why only one?) and reserve it for third-party packages
Date: Sun, 14 Feb 2021 21:37:05 +0000



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.


Frankly, I don't understand why it is necessary to argue so much to explain that a limit of 26 or 52 global bindings is not enough. It's as if your operating system forced you to have at most 26 or 52 files or folders in each folder; of course it would be feasible to use such an operating system, but it would be terribly impractical. I see that, out of the ~11K commands in Emacs core, there are currently ~450-500 commands bound to keys in global-map (counting only the C-something, M-something and C-M-something). I or you may, today, not need more than 26 or 52 global bindings for external packages, we may perhaps only need 10 or 20, but this discussion isn't about me or you, or about the current situation, it's about finding a long-term solution to a problem, with the hope that in the long term more and more external packages will be useful to a large audience. It's about making Emacs friendlier for beginners, and also for third-party library developers by giving them a "home" in Emacs' default keyboard bindings.



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