Re: customize key bindings?
Valdis.Kletnieks(a)vt.edu writes:
1) You don't know what their keyboard looks like (and we
probably
can't do the sort of things Apple did with the Macintosh 'Key Caps'
program).
This is probably irrelevant, given that we can and should use Emacs
keystroke abstractions like "M-foo" or "C-bar". Even if we did know
what their keyboard looked like, it would be worth shit on TTY's.
Emacs key sequences at least have a well-defined meaning everywhere.
2) A user trying to customize keymaps may not *know* or *care*
what the underlying Lisp function is called.
There's not much Customize can do about this, nor about your third
point. I was actually talking about a totally different (and more
earthly, dare I say) range of problems.
The situation I'd like Customize to deal with is a way to say
`M-x customize-keymap RET c-mode-map RET', and handling this sensibly.
My first attempts were to convert the keymap into an alist, and
present the user with editing the alist in a Customize-like
environment, but that sucked, for three reasons:
1) The a-list was extremely large and cumbersome to edit. This is a
general problem with Customize, which cannot (easily) *modify*
complex data structures.
2) There were problems with conversions of a-list keys (if you'll
excuse the pun) to the canonical format. For example, all of C-i,
C-I, and TAB can be assigned to different things in XEmacs, with
a list of "inheritance". These things are not easy to represent in
a UI.
3) It is hard for such view to represent all the more complex things
that keymaps can do, such as setting parents or certain flags. A
similar problem exists with editing faces via Customize.