As a long-time Emacs afficionado, I find this article rather amusing. Emacs Key Bindings Make You Retarded makes the case that years of being used to abominations such as hitting Ctrl+A to go to the beginning of a line can actually prevent you from using newer interfaces that are probably much better, ergonomically and productively. I can fully identify with this problem. I don’t actually use Emacs itself for everything, but nonetheless, I irrationally expect applications to adhere to its arcane system of strange key bindings.
It would be nice to open a program with a text-editing interface and not get three new documents when I press Ctrl+N a few times to move the cursor down a few rows. Selecting the entire text of a document when I’m attempting to move to the beginning of a line with Ctrl+A would be helpful, as well. Alas, I’ve managed to find ways to lobotomize even the most recalcitrant of Windows applications into using Emacs key bindings, largely through a clever program called XKeymacs. Thanks to this little utility, even Microsoft Word behaves like Emacs most of the time.
Of course, as I’ve typed this, I’ve used Ctrl+B several times to move the cursor back and insert a word, then Ctrl+E to skip to the end of the line again and resume typing, a pattern that is so etched into my motor memory that it will likely never fade away. Computers will be voice-controlled in the future, and yet my fingers will still twitch over familiar key bindings, even as I dictate aloud to a low-sapient AI who is already anticipating my needs and inserting those words I’ve forgotten.
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This is the problem we are having with trying to develop a command-key ‘language’ for Hyperwords.
(Hyperwords is a Firefox Extension that makes all the words on the web interactive, for searches, references, emailing, blogging, tagging, translations and more. If you’d like to try it, it’s available for download (for free) from http://www.hyperwords.net )
Most of the time we are using the first letter as the keyboard shortcut, so that you can do ‘rw’ for ‘Reference: Wikipedia’ but it’s not always that simple and there are cases where we are going for language like grammar ‘Email; immediately’ but this doesn’t always make sense, for example with categories under ‘Map’.
It’s not hard designing shortcuts without quirks!