Re:Emacs Bedrock–A minimal Emacs starter kit
by globular-toast on Tuesday September 05, 2023 @03:10PM
(#37396342)
I find them incredibly ergonomic, at least compared to the arrow keys, but that's just me. My newest keyboard doesn't even have arrows keys due to how little I would use them.
Re:Emacs Bedrock–A minimal Emacs starter kit
by hollerith on Tuesday September 05, 2023 @03:13PM
(#37396390)
In all the web browsers I've tried on Windows, Mac and Linux, up and down arrow scroll a little (roughly a twelfth of a page) and people spend more time in browsers than in any editor.
So I end up using Ctrl-n and Ctrl-p to move down and up a line in my editor so that I can customize my editor to make the up and down arrow keys behave like they do in browsers.
Like you, I am annoyed by comments that gush about how great it is to use Emacs keybinds in programs other than Emacs because in for example VSCode, the editor used by about 70% of the world's programmers, none of the Emacs shortcuts work: e.g., ctrl-n / ctrl-p don't move to the next / previous line. And I'm a heavy Emacs user.
Actually back then I used tcsh first because it was the one that commonly had niceties like.. arrow keys.
In shell, I use the emacs bindings for kill-buffer, incremental search, and end of line jump, etc. but arrow keys for cursor movement. I suspect most people who aren't using vi bindings are much the same.
To me the ctrl-n/ctrl-p thing is a piece of ideology, not practicality; as sibling comment pointed out, they are not really ergonomic, and really just date to the fact that various terminals did not have consistent arrow navigations at various point.
Actually I did get used to ctrl-p/ctrl-n in the context of an old MUD client I used to use (TinyFugue, actually I still use it sometimes). It used those bindings for history cycling. And the MOO client I used in emacs also used ESC-p for similar purposes, I recall.