xkeymacs - gives Emacs keys mapping to regular windows apps etc. - was Re: [h-e-w] Problems in buffer saving

[rob . davenport]

Thinking about visemacs and the dream of using the NT port of Emacs in
conjunction with MSDev to get a superior editor, and doing some surfing
I ran across XKeymacs.
      <http://www.cam.hi-ho.ne.jp/oishi/indexen.html>

It's GPL'd software that provides Emacs-style keystrokes and
functionality to
Windows apps.  So now you can have a kill-ring in Notepad, use Ctrl-S to
search, Ctrl-x Ctrl-f to open a file, familiar movement keystrokes, a
kill ring(!),
keyboard macros, universal arguments, etc., in all your Windows apps.
You can apparently also use it to remap your keyboard as well.
(Haven't tried that yet.)

It seems to be a general keystroke remapper, changing C-x C-f, for
example,
into the appropriate Windows message for File->Open in most apps, but
with
added functionality to provide the kill-ring and keyboard macros.   It
says you
can tailor the behavior for specific apps - disabled for some, different
settings
for others, etc. It says it supports Win95, 98, Me, NT4, 2000, XP and
2003.
There's a mailing list for it as well (though I haven't seen what it's
like yet, I've
just started playing with it).

And it can show little indicators for the systray that show the state of
the
Shift/Ctrl/Alt and Meta and Ctrl-X states.  (Useful enough to me to turn
off
auto-hide on the taskbar for now.)

A listing of the keystrokes and their mapped Windows commands
(all look like they can be individually enabled/disabled, and remapped).
C-x C-f     Open                    C-x k       Close
C-x C-s     Save                    C-x C-w     Save As...
C-s   Find... (down)                C-r   Find... (up)
M-%   Replace...              C-M-% Replace...
C-z   Minimize...             C-x C-c     Exit
C-x u Undo                    C-/   Undo
C-_   Undo                    C-g   keyboard-quit (?)
C-b   Left                    C-f   Right
M-b   previous word                 M-f   next word
C-p   Up                      C-n   Down
C-a   Home                    C-e   End
M-<   go to buffer beginning        M->   go to buffer end
M-v   Page up                 C-v   Page down
C-l   recenter                C-d   Delete
C-h   backspace               C-w   Cut
M-w   Copy                    C-k   kill-line
M-d   kill-word               C-y   Paste
M-y   yank-pop                C-t   transpose-chars
C-Space set mark              C-x h mark-whole-buffer
C-x C-p     mark-page               C-u   universal argument
C-0 ... C-9 digit argument          Left Alt, Right Alt, Esc, C-[ Meta
C-m   Enter                   C-o   open-line
C-i   Tab                     M-i   Tab
M-!   Command prompt          C-q   Enable/Disable XKeymacs
C-x ( start-kbd-macro               C-x ) end-kbd-macro
C-x e call-last-kbd-macro


An 'anti-cua' mode for Windows, if you will.  It's not a true substitute
for having
the full power of Emacs in MSDev, but it might ease the pain of
transition when
using both, instead of (like I do) hitting C-s repeatedly when back in
MSDev
and wondering why it's not searching... :)

Rob

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