On Dec 11, 2007 5:59 AM, Ivano ivano.primi@bioquant.uni-heidelberg.de wrote:
Hi everybody,
My name is Ivano Primi, I am (still know) an Emacs user but I tried Geany and I was tempted to change my default editor. I did not do it, just for one reason: I would like to use with Geany the original Emacs keybindings (or at least the most important ones), but unfortunately with Geany 0.12 I am still not able to redefine the keybindings for Copy, Cut and Paste (or at least I did not find the right preference window :) ).
Hi Ivano,
Geany and Emacs have two incompatible (from what I can tell) schemes for dealing with keybindings. Geany uses the Alt-foo keys dealing with the GUI (usually menus and menu items). With Geany, the Alt keys change depending upon which language you're using (your locale, I suppose).
Emacs, OTOH, uses Alt keys often as augmented versions of the corresponding Ctrl keys, and also has key prefixes. C-x to prefix commands for dealing with files, windows, and buffers. C-h for the help commands, C-c for the ones associated with the major mode, M-x for typing in your own command names, and so on.
Currently, Geany does not allow the use of prefix keys like that. Maybe it could via a plug-in. Dunno. Though, presumably, only the Ctrl key ones would be able to be used. I'm not sure if you'd be able to get exclusive use of, say, the M-x and M-g prefixes.
Anyhow, as has been mentioned multiple times on this list, there's not a whole lot of interest on the part of the core developers to make Geany emulate Emacs. Though... since there's now a nifty Lua plug-in available, it might be interesting to hear what their opinion is on using that plug-in to handle prefix key bindings, along with some other missing Emacs-isms. Not sure what's possible via plug-ins at this point -- haven't looked into it. For example, if the plug-in could disable all Alt key bindings for the GUI (?!), they could then be used for the usual Emacs bindings...
---John