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Comment by pax | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain the benefits of c+(f,b,p,n) instead of plain arrow keys?

Also, for c+h/d there's always a dedicated key/single stroke for at least one of those delete actions.

In addition to the control- versions, there are meta- and control+alt- versions that work the same way in greater logical units. For example, moving forward by 1 character/word/sentence-or-expression uses different modifiers for the same keybinding. In Emacs, these consistenly pervade the interface, so, for example, paragraphs in text modes are akin to blocks in or functions in programming modes (depending on if the language is block or function based). This is one reason that Emacs tends to swallow other user interfaces for dedicated Emacs users — everything is highly consistent, and you get a giant head-start on a new systems. Of course, it helps that Emacs is massively customizable, so when something doesn’t quite do what you want, it’s usually a very small bit of hacking to change that.

Historically, many of those keybindings date back to very crude remote terminals where control codes and tty modes were a real concern. For example, I’ve used systems (in the 90’s) where the delete key could freeze your remote connection. Emacs, because of it’s age and ubiquity, has grown up somewhat “around” those traps.

Your fingers stay near home row so you can type faster. Cursor keys are way to far off and differ very much between different keyboards.

What about any benefits of moving your hands around though?

Unless one is a court typist, where wpm matters fully, maybe moving a little and not keeping one's hands on the home row can help avoid carpal tunnel and RSI?

You can keep your hands in typing position on the keyboard while performing these operations. Using the arrow keys or backspace means you need to move to another part of the keyboard which interrupts your flow.

Point taken, thank you. Though, trying it out now, I realised f,b,p,n are not quite next to each other, and funnily enough, while I can easily type without looking at the keyboard, when I use a modifier key, the muscle memory used for typing doesn't seem to help as much, it seems it needs new training. Seems I need to flex more :)

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