[rprospero]

> ... don't have random keybindings triggering stuff.

As a long time Emacs user, I feel that this is slightly unfair. When I first started out, I found that my documents from Emacs were far more common than in other editors. It took me two years to realise that I was often bumping C-t where trying to hit C-r or C-y and silently transposing two characters. In over twenty years of Emacs usage, I have never once used C-t on purpose. I feel that this perfectly matches the "keybindings triggering random stuff" experience and it is fully there in vanilla Emacs.

With twenty years of experience, I have my own, esoteric init file that I would not recommend on any newbie. However, I personally feel that Emacs has succeeded despite its default keybindings.

[chipotle_coyote]

> In over twenty years of Emacs usage, I have never once used C-t on purpose.

This is funny to me because, while I'm not an Emacs user, I'm a Mac user who's gotten used to the tiny subset of Emacs keybindings built into Cocoa text fields, and I use C-t fairly frequently! Apparently you do not make character transposition errors as often as I do.

[rprospero]

That is really interesting. To be fair, I should have prefaced that I have cerebral palsy, so my typing patterns are likely different from most of the population.

[__david__]

I just wish M-t worked in the Cocoa text fields, I somehow use that more than C-t. And M-d, too—I accidentally type "∂" a lot. :-(

[mrtranscendence]

You can enhance the set of keybindings by placing this file in ~/Library/KeyBindings, which will solve the M-d problem (though not the M-t one):

https://github.com/ppwwyyxx/dotfiles/blob/master/macOS/Libra...

It's a life saver.

[__david__]

Oooo, thank you! Knowing that existed led me to https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co... and https://developer.apple.com/documentation/appkit/nsstandardk...

This leads me to believe that this will work:

    "~t"      = "transposeWords:";               /* M-t */

Edit: Sadly, `transposeWords:` doesn't work, despite showing up in Apple's docs—it just beeps when I try to use it.

[chipotle_coyote]

I forget about the "control = by character, meta/escape = by word" idea because of that. (Maybe "smaller unit vs. bigger unit" is more accurate? I dunno.)

I don't know what I'd do with that if I were actually an Emacs user, though, since I use the Option key for typing certain characters a fair amount. Although I'm sure I could remap Emacs meta to virtually anything else, because Emacs.

[__david__]

Yeah, there are certain unicode chars that I use a lot because they are convenient: option-; => …, option-shift-dash => —, option-0 => º, option-G => ©, option-M => µ, option-2 => ™, option-+ => ±. But most of the emacs conflicting ones aren't super useful to me, so I think I can live with them gone: ∑ƒ∂˜π∫†ç¬

[hanche]

I have my emacs config set up so that the left Alt key is meta, while the right one retains its original function. Think of it like AltGr on your typical PC keyboard. But I am using Mitsuharu Yamamoto’s Mac port. I don’t know if that is possible using vanilla GNU emacs, since I haven’t used it in years.