Re: basic question: going back to dired

[Nikolaj Schumacher]

"Lennart Borgman (gmail)" <lennart.borgman@gmail.com> wrote:

>> It's not that "keybinding" is somehow extra good, it's that "shortcut"
>> is unusually bad.
>>
>> The name "shortcut" in most apps carries the implication that it's
>> somehow an unusual method of invoking something, which is only used in
>> rare circumstances for the absolute most heavily used commands (in these
>> apps, the "usual" method is a menu entry).  This is not true in emacs --
>> keybindings are heavily used, and are "normal".
>
> Yes, the definition of "key binding" in Emacs is in itself quite good,
> but that does not help new users that are used to the word "shortcut"
> for similar things in other programs.
>
> At least it did not help me.

Of course the term shortcuts is something reminiscent of GUI programs.
In a text editor menu entries like `compile' might have a shortcut, but
calling C-b a shortcut seems weird.

I don't think there even has to be a name for it ...  Help says: "It is
bound to C-b, <left>.", which sounds reasonable.  So what problems could
a new user have?  I can think only of one: Finding out _how_ to configure
the keys.

I just took a look at Eclipse (because that happened to be installed)
and it doesn't talk about shortcuts in the preferences, either.  It just
has a table with "command" and "key sequence" on a page called "Keys",
yet its easy to find, because it's in a central place.

Maybe custom should support keymaps, and M-x customize-keys could solve
that problem...


regards,
Nikolaj Schumacher