Last week, I wrote about Steve Yegge’s latest Emacs video, Emergency Emacs. The video was mostly about rebinding the Emacs commands that he uses frequently to be as easy to type as possible. One of his rebindings was to replace Meta+< and Meta+> with Ctrl+x t and Ctrl+x e for beginning-of-buffer and end-of-buffer.
It seems like I’m always moving to the top or bottom of the buffer so I type Meta+< and Meta+> a lot. Truth to tell, I kind of like the bindings but they are clumsy to type. I have to move my left hand to hold down Shift and Meta and type < or > with my right hand.
The new bindings are much easier to type and, as Yegge says, you can do it with one hand. I’ve been using them for only a couple of days and they still haven’t been burned into my muscle memory so I have to think about them first. Still, they’re already faster than the old bindings and I’m glad I changed. If you find yourself moving to the top and bottom of the buffer frequently, you should consider making the change too. It’s a bit of pain to retrain your muscle memory but it will make you more efficient.