I came across this comment on Chris Lowis’ blog post about small-screen development in Emacs:

Alex: I can’t be geek enough to use Emacs… it’s not that I think the

editor is bad: it’s the excessive number of keys to press to

accomplish anything.

It made me stop and think, because one of the things I love about Emacs is that I can press lots of keys to accomplish anything.

What’s the alternative? Mouse clicks? Eeew.

My most-common keyboard shortcuts are one or two keys long. Yes, there are many of them, and I use a small subset depending on what I’m working on. If I forget the keyboard shortcut for something, or I want to run a command that doesn’t have a keyboard shortcut, I use M-x (which is really Alt-x on my keyboard) to call the function by name (ex: M-x shell-command-on-region, which turns out to have M-| as a shortcut).

I hardly ever type entire function names. icomplete-mode offers autocompletion for M-x. I also shows me the keyboard shortcuts for a command in order to help me work more efficiently.

If I like something a lot, I can easily define a keyboard shortcut for it using global-set-key. I can set mode-specific keyboard shortcuts so that some shortcuts are active when I’m programming and inactive when I’m not. I can load sets of shortcuts depending on what I want to do. It’s incredibly flexible. Yes, it requires some learning, but it’s been well worth the investment for me.

Because you only have so many keys on a keyboard, it’s useful to be able to define multiple-key shortcuts. I’d rather type Ctrl-c r t than Ctrl-Alt-Shift-R or something like that. (Or worse: spend time looking for just the right toolbar button, and try to click on it with the mouse.) I think of it like super-fast selection through a menu that makes sense to me. In my case, Ctrl-c turned out to be easier to get to than F9 (which I’d previously been using for personal shortcuts), r means remember, and t means task.

You might think that a keyboard-driven editor is slow, but it’s fast enough to keep up with me, and I can probably code circles around you. ;)

More posts about: emacs Tags: highlight | See in index // 17 Comments »