Back before I became an Emacser, a friend who was an Emacser said that I shouldn’t worry about the Emacs keybindings because I could configure them to be whatever I want. I remember thinking that that would be disaster. After all, what would I do if I were using Emacs on someone else’s computer or even setting up a new computer.
Now, of course, I have a very individualistic configuration that makes working on someone else’s computer uncomfortable. Uncomfortable but not impossible. That’s because although I have all sorts of specialized editing commands, I’ve left the “vanilla” editing commands—cursor movements, file visiting and saving, and other standard operations—alone. That means that if I use someone else’s Emacs I can edit successfully, if not optimally, as long as the guest Emacs also didn’t mess with the standard bindings.
That’s why I’m not entirely sympathetic to The MKat’s post on how to unset default key bindings. She’s got a lot of great advice on how to delete keybindings and I agree that it’s useful information to have. My objection is to the notion that you should delete bindings that you don’t like.
Just yesterday, I discussed how modern keyboards aren’t optmal for Emacs so it’s natural to want to fix that somehow. Yesterday’s post suggests some ways of doing that but none of them involve changing default keybindings.
Sure, some folks have special needs that make one binding or another difficult but in general, I think it’s a bad idea to be messing with them. Of course, this is Emacs and everyone can adjust it to their liking. I’m not arguing with that. I’m only saying that if you stay with the defaults it will be easier for you to use an alien Emacs.