Comments on: Mastering Key Bindings in Emacs

By: Hugo

Hugo — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 23:25:11 +0000

Hi Mickey! I really liked yout article. This is the best Emacs blog I know. There’s alot of Emacs stuff on the web that’s very cryptic but your blog has very clear articles. Thanks for your posts

By: mickey

mickey — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 09:31:53 +0000

OK, so, I’m not really answering your question here — and you may well have changed your code for brewity’s sake — but why are you overriding your global keymap like so? If you want to use a different input method (Greek, iso-8859-1, etc.) you should look into using that instead as Emacs has a flexible input method system that does what you need. I’ve written about it on the blog.

Check out “Olé! Diacritics in Emacs”

By: Pavan Ghatty

Pavan Ghatty — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 00:59:16 +0000

Hello Mickey,
I was trying to getting an alpha and a beta symbol in emacs which I did by adding the two lines below to .emacs file.

(global-set-key (kbd ” a”) “α”)
(global-set-key (kbd ” b”) “β”)

When I tried to get an umlaut using the same procedure it didn’t work.
(global-set-key (kbd ” u”) “ü”)
I learned that C-x, 8, “, a/e//i/o/u gives the corresponding alphabet. But I find this rather tedious. So I tried to set up a shortcut which didn’t work either.
(global-set-key (kbd ” u”) C-x 8 ” u)

Could you please suggest a solution?
Thank you!
P

By: Zen Coding | 따라쟁이

Zen Coding | 따라쟁이 — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 13:04:55 +0000

[...] mastering key binding in emacs [...]

By: Saheel

Saheel — Thu, 31 May 2012 07:48:24 +0000

Hi Mickey, a very informative post indeed.
I have a task at hand:
I am using Evil and in “insert” and “normal” state, C-e is bound to ‘evil-copy-from-below and ‘evil-scroll-line-down command resp. I want to remap it to ‘end-of-line. I tried this:

(define-key (current-global-map) [remap evil-copy-from-below] ‘end-of-line)
(define-key (current-global-map) [remap evil-scroll-line-down] ‘end-of-line)

and it worked. But I want C-e to execute ‘end-of-line in other states also (such as “visual” state, etc.). And I don’t want to find out what C-e does in each state and then remap it to ‘end-of-line. I tried this:

(define-key (current-global-map) (kbd “C-e”) ‘end-of-line)

but it didn’t work. It didn’t even do what ‘remap’ did earlier.

Can you help me?

By: mickey

mickey — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 22:35:42 +0000

I know what you mean, but Emacs is at the very least flexible and very accommodating of just about every window manager and terminal emulator you may end up using. That’s why there’s so many layers but for all practical purposes you shouldn’t care.

I advise everybody to never, ever, ever use Emacs in a terminal unless you’re confident in your ability to diagnose strange behavior, or because you have no other choice.

By: Bryan Henderson

Bryan Henderson — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 18:55:49 +0000

My comment above got mangled. “I have pressed a key Emacs calls …” is supposed to be followed by the word “next” in angle brackets, in the Emacs key naming style.

By: Bryan Henderson

Bryan Henderson — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 18:52:10 +0000

I’ve found that the most vexing part of assigning Emacs commands to keystrokes is the several layers of mapping that happens below what’s described here. E.g. when I press the piece of plastic that says “Page Down”, what “key” have I pressed, as the term is used in the article. In some cases, I have pressed a key Emacs calls . In others, I have pressed four in a row: Escape, [, 6, and tilde.

If you want to assign the physical Page Down key to some command, you have to master those lower level mappings as well.

Those layers exist in keyboards, drivers, terminal emulators, and other places. At least one of them is inside Emacs: on one of my newer systems, when Emacs gets the three ASCII characters Escape, O, W, I have pressed the Emacs “7″ key (this is not arbitrary – some terminals in some modes generate that sequence when you press numeric keypad 7).

By: mickey

mickey — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 19:47:41 +0000

Yeah, that’s right; the keymap lookup order does hint at that, though perhaps I should add a template to demonstrate it.

Thanks!

By: Greg

Greg — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 19:41:40 +0000

Very useful, as always! One related tip that I recently discovered: you can define a minor mode map as a way to ensure your global key bindings don’t get overridden by some other mode.

Details here on StackOverflow: http://bit.ly/sqlMus