Just in case you haven’t heard enough whining about Emacs not having “modern” keybindings, arthurno1 over at the Emacs subreddit has a long post on possible ways to reconfigure Emacs to get them. It’s an interesting post because arthurno1 actually considers ways to solve the problem rather than just complaining that Emacs keybindings aren’t what he’s used to1.
The problem turns out to be more difficult than you might think. It probably explains why there isn’t a set of “keybinding themes” similar to the display themes that we have.
I should be more sympathetic to those wanting Emacs to use conventional keybindings. After all, I’ve admitted several times that I have a hard time using multiple keybindings. But when I thought about it, I realized my problem is with using multiple keybindings for they same type of application. For example, I would have a hard time using both Emacs and Vim, even though I know them both well because my muscle memory would cause me to use the wrong binding for a given operation. I have no problem using different keybindings for different apps. So, for example, it doesn’t bother me at all to use Ctrl+s for search in Emacs and ⌘ Cmd+f for the same operation in Safari. Of course, since I mostly live in Emacs, even different keybindings among applications isn’t much of a problem.
I suspect, though, that a lot of this yearning for “modern” keybindings really means, “I want it to be like VS Code” or whatever other editor they’re used to. For those people, I can do no better than to channel Dennis Ritchie: If you want VS Code, you know where to find it.
Footnotes:
Actually, it’s not clear if arthurno1 himself wants a different set of keybindings or if he’s just setting out to solve the problem.