Re: outline of introductory Emacs concepts

[Miles Bader]

Ilya Zakharevich <nospam-abuse@ilyaz.org> writes:
> > This is simply not true; I'm a _very_ experienced user of emacs but it
> > would certainly take me some head scratching and confusion if my binding
> > didn't work because `ESC ESC' had shadowed it.
> 
> If the error message is confusing, the solution should be to change
> the error message,

You don't understand -- there _is no error message_, because there is no
`error'; if the user types e.g. `ESC <left>' the ESC ESC captures the
user's ESC, and the ESC that starts the escape-sequence for <left>, and
the rest of the escape-sequence for <left> gets inserted into the buffer
or something.  That's why it's such a confusing situation, because emacs
can't really detect that it's happening, and so can't do anything to
compensate.

> not that 99.9% percents of users should suffer.

99.9% of the users don't suffer -- they use ^G.

-Miles
-- 
Come now, if we were really planning to harm you, would we be waiting here, 
 beside the path, in the very darkest part of the forest?