[rcfox]

...People do that? Make emacs work for you; don't work for it!

There's nothing wrong with using the arrow keys. There's nothing wrong with remapping return to do newline and indent. Heck, if you want to use the standard C-c, C-v, C-x for copy, paste, cut, there's a mode for that too. (http://www.emacswiki.org/CuaMode)

Put your .emacs and .emacs.d somewhere easily accessible and updateable, like GitHub or Dropbox, and you don't have to worry about not knowing the default settings.

[sliverstorm]

There's something to be said for complying with default settings. I know there are people out there who only ever work on their own machines, but I find that when I'm hopping around on 100+ different boxes I don't own it's worth the trouble to live by the default mappings and behaviors.

[m0nastic]

I used this as a rationale for learning VIM 15 years ago.

The overwhelming majority of machines I've accessed haven't had Emacs installed, so I'm not sure if there's a huge problem with remapping your Emacs config to be something that works for you.

Part of me also thinks this is similar to the argument for buying a sedan over a coupe. For me personally, the number of times I've had to transport someone in the back seat isn't nearly sufficient to justify purchasing a vehicle with that in mind.

I don't know if suffering through the default bindings is worth the pain for the once in a blue moon that you'll be using a different system that has Emacs installed.

[mhd]

"Emacs actually comes with a builting Emacs Aptitude Test. Do you remap your keyboard or the Emacs keybindings before the chords and sequences it comes with by default have wreaked havoc with your hands?" -- Erik Naggum[1]

[1]: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/f499cca6b4...

[stuhacking]

This is why you can do: (load-file "/<user>@<host>:~/.emacs")

(Assuming your 100+ machines are capable of reaching your home directory in some way (ssh, ftp, ...). If not, you could also put your desired emacs init in a publicly accessible location.)

Edit: Or put a copy on a USB drive, or diskette, or floppy.

[sliverstorm]

(Half the time a given box didn't even have network access)

[pdelgallego]

Or even simpler, just upload your .emacs (even better, all the dot-files) to github so you can load or clone them anytime.