Re: Emacs learning curve

[Tassilo Horn]

On Friday 16 July 2010 19:38:46 Óscar Fuentes wrote:

> > This heavily depends on your keyboard layout.
> 
> Yes, I'm using a very expensive keyboard just because it has a great
> ergonomics for working with Emacs.

The price and quality of the keyboard doesn't make a big difference
compared to the choice of layout, e.g. QUERTY, Dvorak or Neo.  And I
think it's a bad idea to choose keybindings so that they are convenient
or logical for one single layout.  That's the reason for avoiding hjkl
movement.  Mnemonics are platform/layout independent.

> > Similarly, C-k, C-y and M-y have clear mnemonics derived from the
> > concepts of killing and yanking.
> 
> Worrying about mnemonics for operations you do hundreds of times per
> day is a waste.

Not really, but bindings for frequently used commands should be short.
And C-w, M-w, C-y, M-y are as short as the CUA bindings.  And because
they have clear mnemonics, they should be easily perceptible by newbies,
too, once they have learned the concepts behind killing and yanking.

With CUA (which I have currently switched on for testing) the bindings
have no mnemonics anymore, and they are still not what I would expect
from a "normal" editor.  For example, C-a normally selects the complete
contents of a buffer, but in emacs even with CUA it moves point to the
beginning of a line.  Since that's a much more important operation than
selecting all contents, I guess that's ok.  But nevertheless, it doesn't
match a non-emacs user's expectation.

And there are many other bindings in common editors which are short but
rarely used, like C-s for saving (goodbye isearch), C-p for printing
(goodbye movement), and many more.  If we would try to match newbies
expectations, we would sacrifice so many short bindings that emacs
wouldn't be as effective as it is right now.

The standard keybindings in today's editors are the ones they are now
mostly because nearly none of them support keychords.

Bye,
Tassilo