Comment by koalaman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by koalaman | Hacker News Reader

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Finding a good set of key bindings is unfortunately not all that easy, and something I'd rather not have to do. What's frustrating is the lack of consistency within linux as to what are appropriate keybindings at the OS/Application level which results in a lot of binding conflicts (Unity, tmux, and most tiling window managers come to mind).

The default emacs keybindings strike me as particularly insane and not suitable for productivity or long term wrist health, but I use them because I don't want to go through every different mode as well as tmux, and my wm to figure out which bindings are going to clash.

I know that I should do it, but I'm lazy. If anybody has a really thought out set of bindings that are optimized for minimizing chords and sequence length as well as conflicts I would love to know about it.

What I'd really like is a scientific project to come up with a control scheme for the OS and emacs that maximizes keyboard efficiency.

The default bindings suck because (1) your control key is in the wrong place and (2) your meta key is in the wrong place. The first goes to the left of "A", the second underneath "/". Seriously: remap (getting meta right is hard, as keyboards aren't consistent about what they put there sadly) and try it again. When done right, your fingers stay closer to the home row than even vim (which requires frequent excursions to the shifted number row).

Nah, I have remapped those keys and the problem for me is the chords which sometimes require three or more actions for commonly used commands.

"Finding a good set of key bindings is unfortunately not all that easy, and something I'd rather not have to do."

There is nothing in the idea of teaching <next-line> as <M-x next-line> versus <C-x n> which requires finding a new set of key bindings. Emacs will even helpfully remind me every time I type <M-x next-line> that it is bound to <C-x n>.[1] That's an absurdity within the standard approach to Emacs tutorials.

[1] I am assuming that this is not just a feature of the Emacs configuration I downloaded as part of LispCabinet. http://lispcabinet.sourceforge.net/

I gave up looking for the perfect set of bindings and just switched to using evil-mode. While not perfect, definitely good enough and widely used.

Emacs' default bindings are also widely used but the chords are indeed horrendous.

There is ergoemacs.org though I gave up trying to adjust myself.

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