Re: emacs-oob-reboot

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Sat, 06 May 2017 07:13:37 +0100
> From: Damian Chrzanowski <address@hidden>
> 
> There's a lot of talk on reddit already about new improvements "breaking" 
> things, people's configs suffering,
> key bindings reconfigured, etc.

FWIW, we try to minimize such breakage, and have the information about
getting back the old behavior in NEWS which goes with each new release.

> Therefore, I suggest that on first load emacs should ask the user about key
> binding preferences :
> 
> 1. I have my own .el files, ask me where they are Emacs so that you can 
> import them (from GitHub, zip files,
> etc.)
> 2. I want emacs standard keyboard bindings please
> 3. I want Cua mode so that Emacs behaves like "popular" editors
> 4. I want Vim-like modal editing key bindings (this option will install evil 
> and a few evil extras, hypothetically).
> 5. Whatever else is out there???

If your key bindings are recorded on init files of any kind that Emacs
processes during startup, they will be largely unaffected by changes
in new Emacs versions.  So I'm not sure what problem you are asking to
solve by this proposal.

> Let's not fool ourselves, editor wars are silly and childish. What we want to 
> do is create a more attractive and
> mature environment and I believe that this will represent a more open 
> approach. This approach will also
> show, at the very beginning, just how flexible Emacs is and that it can be 
> modified to any preferences.
> 
> I am of a strong opinion that a lot of folks would simply put Emacs away 
> based on the fact that they felt forced
> to use Ctrl +... to move around. Well... Let's move on and show that Emacs is 
> much more than that!

That's okay, and that's why Emacs provides customization features.
You should be able to customize your keybindings once, and have those
customizations be in effect for many Emacs versions.