Should emacs be different?

What do C-y, C-k, C-x r y, and C-x r k have to do with npfb? They function completely independently (as far as I understand), and the mnemonics aren't even linked conceptually. I did have to make a quick fix to my smartparens configurations so that forward, backward, next, and previous s-expression functions were consistent with my chosen navigation keys... but it also seems clear to me that these chords for navigating s-expressions is not any part of the reason for the choice of fbnp, but rather because fbnp was already chosen, it made sense for navigating s-expression, by analogy. So I don't think this counts as evidence that there is deeper thought to the choice of fbnp, it only shows that other things have built on that choice.

This I grant: one shouldn't go mucking about changing default setting unless they're also prepared to muck about changing other stuff to suite their needs. And one should expect that, if they rebind fbnp to something they like better, then they should expect to be rebinding any analogous stuff they encounter. That's not barrier to use, that's just further customization.

The issue here is that the beginner is unaware of the full extent of what they're discarding, when they abandon the defaults before learning what is built atop them.

They're not abandoning anything: all the defaults are still right there, immediately recoverable just by moving the config file. Even if they just experiment with changing defaults and end up deciding to go back to them 6-months later, they still haven't lost anything. Instead, they have felt empowered and encouraged to make the tool fit their needs, and they have also learned the value of some initial setting which they had at first overlooked. There's no harm done in this scenario, and in fact a great good, since they have tasted the flexibility of the tool instead of feeling cramped by some sense of allegiance to legacy.

I know you seem to think that their is a great wisdom to (nearly) all the default configurations, but I literally have never heard a good explanation for them. The fact that later bindings are chosen to suite the more basic defaults isn't a justification of those initial choices. Rather, if there is no good defense of the initial choices it is a good argument for why sweeping changes should be made to the default settings.

There's also the issue of antiquated tooling within the Emacs ecosystem: for instance, with multiple cursors mode at my disposal, I have found no use for rectangle selection: the latter covers all use cases of the former and more (at least, as far as I've been able to see). Ditto smarparens mode vs. the default s-expression navigation. Given that most basic emacs functionality is improved by some package or another, in which case you'll be wanting to customize the packages in any case, it seems to me that even the argument based on accretion of bindings over the initial defaults is irrelevant. The nail in the coffin for this argument is the existence of key-chord-mode: even if some re-binding I chose early on conflicted with a more obscure default binding I discovered down the road, I could just bind the latter to a convenient key-chord completely independent from the rest of my bindings, and I'd immediately have the desired functionality.

/r/emacs Thread Parent