Every three or four years, I run across a tweet or post from someone who’s discovered that the Mac recognizes a few basic Emacs keybindings. Here’s the most recent example. The time before that was about three years ago.
It’s nice that MacOS has some of those keystrokes built in but it’s actually much better than that. The OS has the facility to map arbitrary keystrokes to the various editing and cursor movement functions. All you have to do, as I explained in my original post on the matter, is provide a text file containing the mappings.
Once you do that, you’ll have many Emacs keybindings available system wide. Another nice thing is that you don’t have to make up your own text file containing the bindings. There’s a pointer to one you can download at the link immediately above. Of course, you can edit it to suit your own notion of what the proper bindings should be. I’ve been using this capability for years and wouldn’t want to live without it. Until we can do everything from within Emacs, this is a nice way of leveraging our Emacs muscle memory.