Re: Getting Emacs to play nice with Hunspell and apostrophes

[Nikolai Weibull]

On Thu, Jun 12, 2014 at 2:51 PM, Stefan Monnier
<monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
>> The fact that everybody uses " and ' and ` is a historical artifact, a
>> workaround of sorts, due to the limitations of the mechanical
>> typewriter. We need not be affected by it any more.
>
> The limitation of "number of keys on a keyboard" along with the
> limitations of the human brain mean that it's still very convenient for
> users to be able to just use " and ' rather than having umpteen
> subvariants and needing to remember which to use where and how to type
> them in.

Remembering when to use which of four symbols is hardly taxing (and –
even when considering additional “variants” such as ‘′’, ‘″’ for prime
and double prime – not close to the definition of umpteen, I’d say),
though the “how to type them in” arguments deserves a bit more
consideration, such as the automatic replacement that many editors
perform.  Personally, keyboard bindings such as \C-k ' 9 (from Vim and
now Evil) are wired deep into my fingers, so much so that I still
haven’t been able to move over to using the more convenient & ' 9 from
the rfc1345 input method.