This is your periodic reminder that you can get most of the Emacs editing keystrokes in any macOS application. I usually publish this reminder when I see a tweet or post from someone who has discovered that the Emacs cursor movement keystrokes work in macOS.
Here’s the tweet that inspired this post:
Whoever at @apple is maintaining the #emacs bindings for moving cursors, I appreciate you.
Ctrl-A, Ctrl-E, Ctrl-N, Ctrl-P. Can’t live without it. It surprisingly works *everywhere* on macOS.
— Leo Shimonaka (@leoshimo) October 14, 2022
That’s great, of course, but you can do much better. You can, in fact, arrange to have most of the Emacs editing commands available everywhere in macOS. Here’s my original post that explains how to do that. The links in that post lead to a Harvard server that sometimes is not available. If it’s down when you try to get the keybindings file, you can get it here. If you prefer using Esc instead of the ⌥ Opt key for Meta, get this file instead.
Having those keystrokes available takes some of the sting out of having to leave Emacs to use some Apple specific application. I don’t know Leo Shimonaka and I’m not on Twitter so if any of you do know him, please point him at this post or otherwise let him know what to do to get all the Emacs goodness possible.