Emacs elements has another interesting video, this time on some commands that he’s rebound for quick invocation. Those commands are (roughly):
kill-bufferset-mark-command(Push mark)set-mark-command(Pop mark)exchange-point-and-markjump-out-of-pair(A custom command)
He begins the video with some praise for the IBM Model M keyboard that he uses. I can relate. As I’ve written before, it’s the greatest keyboard every made. It’s layout is pretty standard so whatever “standard” keyboard you’re using probably has a very similar layout.
Emacs customization, of course, is all about making it as frictionless as possible for your workflow so it makes no sense to criticize someone else’s bindings but it’s interesting how different his choices are from mine.
He uses Ctrl+1, Meta+1, and Meta+2 for some of those commands. He says re realizes that theese are prefix keys but says he never uses them. I, on the other hand, use them all the time. If I want to delete 2 words, I do it with Meta+2 Meta+d. Similarly, if I want to delete 3 characters, it’s Ctrl+3 Ctrl+d. These are all burned into my muscle memory and I’d never give them up.
There’s more to his customization than just rebinding the keys. Most of the above commands also activate the mark and result in highlighting regions. That’s almost never what I want and neither does he. He has a bit of custom code to deactivate the mark so that doesn’t happen. Even if, like me, you don’t care for his rebindings, you may want to grab his code to eliminate the mark activation.
This is a short video and worth a few minutes of your time.