Subject: Re: Allegro/Emacs C-a fix
From: Erik Naggum <cl@naggum.no>
Date: 1998/06/03
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3105884989305517@naggum.no>


* Jeffrey Mark Siskind
| I could never understand the logic behind this.  Both a prompt-sensitive
| and a prompt-insensitive move-to-beginning-of-line are useful behaviours.
| However, in my experience, the prompt-sensitive version is used far more
| often than the prompt-insensitive version.  Isn't it desirable to have
| the more-often-used command bound to a shorter keystroke sequence.  I.e.,
| bind C-c C-a to the prompt-insensitive version and bind C-a to the
| prompt-sensitive version?  So I believe that that ILisp got this right
| and the official Emacs policy got this wrong.  Cam someone please
| enlighten me with the compelling reasons that motivate the official Emacs
| policy?

  well, there was a vote on this some time ago, quite obviously because
  this is a question of taste and an application of the principle of least
  astonishment, which I think is subjectivity at its best, and thus an
  arbitrary decision with both good "arguments" and people failing to see
  the logic of the arguments for any given viewpoint.  nonetheless, people
  voted overwhelmingly in favor of C-a retaining its usual semantics.

  now, I don't know whether this is rationalization after the fact or
  actually a good argument in favor of the status quo, but the same can be
  said to apply to other Emacs editing commands that have dual meaning in
  various special modes, like C-c, C-d, C-w, C-z, etc.

#:Erik
-- 
  "Where do you want to go to jail today?"
			-- U.S. Department of Justice Windows 98 slogan