I periodically publish reminders that
- macOS uses some common Emacs editing keystrokes by default, and that
- You can do much better by adding other Emacs keystrokes to those that macOS will recognize.
Here’s one such recent reminder. Now Bozhidar Batsov has turned the tables and revealed that Emacs also recognizes many macOS commands1. If you look in ns-win.el you’ll see a rather long list of macOS bindings that Emacs will recognize. You can, for example, save a file with ⌘ Cmd+s or start an incremental search with ⌘ Cmd+f. There’s a surprisingly large number of other such bindings. Take a look at Batsov’s post or ns-win.el for the details.
I didn’t know about any of this except for using ⌘ Cmd+f for isearch. I stumbled on that because I rebound Ctrl+s to swiper-isearch but sometimes wanted to do a regular incremental search. Even then, it didn’t click that Emacs was emulating macOS keybindings.
Other than that—and examples like it that other users may need—I can’t see the point of using those bindings. It seems like just another way of confusing my muscle memory. Of course, as I’ve confessed before, I’m very bad at handling multiple sets of keybindings.
For me, it makes more sense to make Emacs keybinding available to macOS rather than the other way around. Of course, you may disagree and want to standardize on macOS bindings. The great thing is that, as usual, Emacs2 let’s us have it our way.