Re: Key bindings proposal

[Uday S Reddy]

Stuart Hacking writes:

> To me, this sounds a lot like personal preference. I already have an
> emacs-lisp file full of global and mode specific keybindings and
> another with some convenience defaliases. These make sense for the way
> I work, but I'm sure they would be completely inappropriate for
> certain other users.

Excellent.  The only "personal" thing I see about it is that you might
have picked aliases based on personal preference.  But there is no
reason why the concept of giving such aliases is personal.  That is a
generally useful idea.

> Is your suggestion to automatically alias functions by the current
> major mode? (by, for example, removing the prefix? (dired-do-isearch
> -> isearch))

Indeed, that is one part of the suggestion.  The part 2 of the
suggestion is to allow key bindings for such aliases, which would then
be widely applicable across several modes.

> Or, do you want a simple method of aliasing commands across modes? How
> would this work?
> 
> (define-multi-alias 'isearch
>   ('dired-mode 'dired-do-isearch)
>   ...
>   ...
>   (t 'isearch))

Do you mean you already have such an aliasing scheme?  I suppose one
can dispatch on the major mode.  That is neat!

It is not a general solution, of course, since it is based on a closed
world assumption about what modes one needs to deal with.  But it is a
good starting point.

> the 'architecture' that I use is a combination of `defalias',
> `add-hook', and `define-key' in my personal init files. Am I doing
> something wrong?

So, I suppose you will let dired-mode do all its self-righteous key
bindings and then use a hook to overwrite all of them with your own
key bindings?  I think I am beginning to like this
software-as-the-enemy principle!

Cheers,
Uday