Re: [h-e-w] MS Windows Keybinding

[Lennart Borgman (gmail)]

Juanma Barranquero wrote:
> On 10/29/07, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> > Actually, I think Lennart pushed it enough at the time.
>
> I remember that. The key words here are "at the time". 

IMO, yes.

> Moreover, if
> someone fails to convince other developers of the goodness of his/her
> patch, perhaps there are technical reasons for it...

The patch is perhaps/of course not perfect, but I think I remember there 
were some grave misunderstandings.

> > FWIW, I'm quite opposed to low-level keyboard hooks, because they
> > bring in an enormous complexity when one wants to deal with non-ASCII
> > keyboard input.
>
> And FWIW, I looked at the patch and it seemed to me like too much
> complexity for too little gain. Perhaps I'm biased.

Of course we all are biased ;-) -- I would find it very cumbersome to 
use Emacs without this patch. The main reason is that it provides easy 
access to some keyboard handling:

- You can use the menus the way you normally do in Windows. The menus 
are important for doing things you seldom do in Emacs.
- You can use META-Tab the way you normally do it in Emacs.'
- There are more, but (if I do not forget anything) those were the main 
reasons.

This comes at the cost of not beeing able to use the left or/and Window 
keys for normal Windows operation while in Emacs. A low cost for me.


The main part of the low level keyboard patch does not introduce any 
complexity as far as I remember. The complexity is just slightly moved.

However the current use of Alt as META in Emacs hides some bugs 
regarding the menu handling. If I remember correctly that is part of the 
patch too. But it was a long time since I wrote that patch now and it 
touches complex code in Emacs.