[slime-devel] Re: New keybindings for documentation commands

[Bill_Clementson at peoplesoft.com]

Luke Gorrie <luke at bluetail.com> writes:

> Peter Seibel <peter at javamonkey.com> writes:
>
> > Luke Gorrie <luke at bluetail.com> writes:
> >
> >> Ahoy,
> >>
> >> As previously discussed the documentation commands have now been
> >> grouped under a `C-c C-d' prefix. The commands are:
> >>
> >>   a - apropos
> >>   p - apropos-package
> >>   z - apropos-all
> >>   d - describe-symbol
> >>   f - describe-function
> >>   h - hyperspec lookup
> >>   ~ - hyperspec lookup of a format character
> >>
> >> The final keystroke is bound both unmodified and with control, so
> >> both `C-c C-d a' and `C-c C-d C-a' will make an apropos search.
> >
> > Why? It seems silly to eat up twice as many key combos as we need to.
> > (I haven't been following the discussion of this closely so if there
> > was some reason that everyone already agreed was righteous you can
> > just tell me so.)
>
> Well, at least I like the last key unmodified, and at least Bill
> Clementson likes the last key modified. I figured that since they're
> already on their own documentation-commands prefix (C-c C-d) that
> we're unlikely to run out of keys, so we can just make everyone happy
> in this respect.
>
> There's still meta if we do end up running out of letters. :-)

We had a similar discussion on the ilisp-devel list last year when we were
changing key bindings so that they conformed to fsf standards. Some people
(including me at that time) liked the unmodified last key and some
preferred a modified last key for key chords that had to use 3 keys.
Andreas Fuchs summed up his rationale for the modified key option in this
posting:
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=2389721&forum_id=5779

A few other people agreed with Andreas - I tried out both combinations and
came around to Andreas' POV as well. However, some people (Luke included)
prefer the other approach. Remember, this is only an issue with the 3-key
chords as the 2-key chords need to be bound to either a control key (for
each key) or a special character (for the second key) in order to conform
to fsf major mode standards. Since we only use 3-key chords for certain
"groups" of commands (e.g. -- documentation), we are probably not going to
run out of 3-key sequences any time soon ;-)

So, it probably doesn't hurt to bind to both sets of keys as it will keep
everybody happy :-)

- Bill