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Comment by revertts | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to have to disagree with '6. Keep Your Keybindings Standard.'

When I started with emacs, there were some bindings that would make my hands ache after a day of use, usually from the transition between difficult keybindings, not any one key combination in isolation. One of the first things I did was add in the ergoemacs bindings, and I never regretted it. It's not as if doing so made me suddenly forget what the old bindings were, although I am slower during the rare cases when I'm on the normal keybindings. But it's a small price to pay for not having my fingers hate me.

Editors are meant to be customized to your workflow and what works best for you.

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I agree with you about the default keybindings (they're sadistic), but I think that people will have an easier time learning Emacs if they wait to start rebinding things until they're familiar with the conventions.* There are a lot of patterns in the way keybindings are defined for various major modes, for example, and rebinding everything to make it more like textmate or whatever obscures them. Also, it's a good idea to check if new bindings are replacing another highly useful command, particularly if one doesn't know how to access it otherwise.

Some of this probably matters less if using Emacs on other peoples' computers isn't an issue, though. (Same with using Dvorak or other layouts.)

* Perhaps around the time they start learning Elisp, rather than copying and modifying other peoples' config files. Nothing wrong with doing that, just, that comes much earlier.

Yeah, I was going to post this as well. If you use Emacs change your keybindings to whatever you're comfortable with. This isn't freakin' VI or an editor you use in a sysadmin / dead server environment: Emacs should be the editor you spend most of your life in as an IDE, for mail, news, writing documents, etc.

Also put your keybindings.el somewhere online so you can load it up when you're in a new environment.

If you use Bash some of the handy default Emacs bindings will be known to you already.

That mostly depends on how much you use ONLY your own system. If you have to use different systems much, getting used to idiosyncratic keybindings will REALLY slow you down, and the faster and more instinctively you use them the more it will slow you down.

I do take some exception to his advocating the arrow keys - they slow you down less than the mouse, but ^P, ^N, ^F, and ^B do the exact same thing as the arrow keys and you don't have to take your hand off the keyboard at all.

Yes and no. When I first started off with Emacs, I used the CUA bindings (Windows-esque bindings for C-x/C-v/C-c). That was great to begin with, but inevitably a change of settings as big as CUA never quite sat right with the rest of Emacs, and prevented me from really moving on. After a while I declared cua-mode to be a crutch that was holding me back, disabled it, and I'm extremely glad I did.

More recently I've moved mostly away from the arrow-keys navigation (not just up/down/left/right instead of n/p/b/f but Home End instead of C-a, C-e; C-left, C-right instead of M-b, M-f; C-up, C-down instead of M-{, M-}; C-Home, C-End instead of M-< and M->, etc.) to the more central commands. This is less of a win but has nonetheless sped up my editing still further.

"Editors are meant to be customized to your workflow and what works best for you."

Sure, but if you do it too soon, all tutorials and howtos will be a pain to follow.

Comfort is important. How are you using your F1-F12 keys?

Also, if you have a whole bunch of bindings you may want to use a 24-function-key keyboard for IBM's (like http://www.quadibloc.com/comp/images/122hc.gif or http://www.nlynx.co.uk/products/keyboard.aspx) or a Sun Type-7 Unix lay-out (the one with special keys for your left pinky) may help.

I bought a Kinesis keyboard, and that solved most of my RSI issues with emacs. Thanks for the tip on ergoemacs; I still have some issues when using my laptop.

I agree with this - I customize all my keybindings if they are two arcane or uncomfortable. Combining this with a fanatical preference to always use my own computers (why wouldn't I? - I spent so much time customizing it!) makes me efficient and productive.

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