Very basic commands seem zany to me.. does it make sense later?

hello, Since emacs was reccomended to me many times, I decided to sit down and go through the tutorial. Immediately though the idea that you navigate with "f" for forward, "b" for backwards, "n" for next line, "p" for previous seems counterintuitive. The keys have no logical physical relationship to each other. I am not going to remember the mnemonics. Is there some bigger picture rationality that will fall into place if I go on or is the whole thing so arbitrary? I *did* like the concepts of how the navigation worked. I can really see how it would be fast *if* learned. Not sure I will be able to acheive comfort with what I am seeing. I dont work in the kind of environment where I'd be able to practice all day. just on my own time. thoughts? encouragement?

Emacs's vanilla keybindings do make a *lot* of sense, but they take a while to get used to. I myself think that [Evil](https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil) is better. But others, rightfully so, may have a different opinion.

Zany is beautiful. You can bind any keys to any commands you like. You can bind `a` to insert `Z`, or anything else you might like. **Keys Minus Zero / No Limit**

> The keys have no logical physical relationship to each other. Why is this necessary? If you limited what you were able to do with a keyboard by physical relationships to actions, you wouldn't be able to do much. I suppose we'd need a pair of bluetooth enabled scissors to cut text?

Let’s not be hostile to the new users, please.

Yes. Also, as an English speaker, these mnemonics seem pretty tight (at least to me). It's worth reading the [Mastering Emacs article on Movement](https://masteringemacs.org/article/effective-editing-movement) for a little more detail. I suspect many of us use isearch or imenu for navigation.

FWIW: eventually the default bindings tend to click and make sense, but the first impression can be brutal. If you want to use the arrow keys instead, go for it. If you want to rebind the default keys you have tools to do so. However, I will say that I do not regret getting the movement keys into muscle memory.

I used a silly example to show the assumption doesn't hold outside of a narrow set of commands. You're reading "hostility" into it. I'm sure the person I was speaking to is capable of taking their own offense if they please. No need for you to patronize them or me.

In the beginning I felt I bit like that as well, but now I realize that neither mnemonics nor physical position are that important, at least for me. You memorize them because you use them a lot. And once you build muscle memory, nothing else matters much.

> Not sure I will be able to acheive comfort with what I am seeing So why not rebind the keys? Or use some package that rebinds the keys or even changes the way input works (like xah-fly-keys or evil)? > Is there some bigger picture rationality that will fall into place if I go on or is the whole thing so arbitrary? You memorize shortcuts by using them, you have to actually use the editor, not just browse through the tutorial. Emacs default keys (fwiw, I don't like them either, I stick with evil) are used in other programs though, especially in terminal. Readline, the usual line editor, uses emacs bindings by default, so it's pretty damn useful to be familiar with those (though to be fair, you can use the vi mode for vi-style editing).

it's important because I have limited cognitive abilities. "Cut" is not a bad example acrually. In standard GUIs, "cut" is `ctrl` + `x`. As far as I know, this was picked just because of its physical relationship to the bottom left of the keyboard. If you are a mouse user (using a GUI), your left hand is most likely to be at the keyboard so the most commonly-used keyboard shortcuts should be easy to use with the left hand. The order of the `Edit` menu and therefor the order of the shortcuts is always, every single time, in windows, mac and linux GUIs: "undo", "cut", "copy" and "paste". `ctrl` + `z`, `ctrl` + `x`, `ctrl` + `c`, `ctrl` + `v`. The only one that makes mnemonic sense is `ctrl` + `c` for **c**opy, the others are just easy to reach. "Undo" makes sense as the first one because it is something you would want to do a lot. "Paste" makes sense as the last of the group because it comes sequentially after either "cut" or "copy". If you can't touch type, the keys in the bottom left corner are the easiest to find without looking; again they are optimally placed for the most common and basic shortcuts. The more you get into the middle of they keyboard, the more likely errors become. I figured all of this out when I briefly switched to Dvorak layout. All of a sudden, nothing makes any sense. I realized the extent to which common shortcuts are thoughtfully organized for a right-handed user on a QWERTY layout. Why is `ctrl` + `w` "close"? Because you close the **w**indow? No, because it's logically related to "**q**uit" and "**s**ave".

So... should I learn vi first, then transpose that onto emacs?

You seem to be confusing logic and convention. It's kind of like thinking "Well of course 'A' comes before 'B' in the alphabet. That's how it is." When in reality the only logic behind it is "we need to pick something and stick to it." Lucky for you Emacs is flexible enough to implement whatever keybinding scheme you desire.

thank you this looks very promising. A bit of theory to hang all the key combos off of. It took me 2 attempts to pass grade 10 math due to being unable to memorize the formula for slope of a line (`y = mx + b`... eventually I managed). If I had the formula in front of me I could solve it easily but they wouldn't let us have notes for tests and I was too stubborn to cheat. So the only way I could get through a test was by deriving the formula from principals every time and it took me a long time to be able to do that. Which is all to say that I am really, really bad at memorizing arbitrary letters that mean things without having some structure to go by. If this guy is explaining with concepts than I will find it useful.

I feel like it could get even zanier if I just go straight away to rebinding keys. I tried that with nano and got myself into a real pickle. I didn't have a good overall understanding of everything that I would want to do so I took key combos from more advanced features to use for simple ones because they made sense at the time. But then when I got around to wanting the more advanced features I had to figure out what to do and basically it ended up with a really idiotic bespoke configuration that isn't even cross platform and at the end of the day makes much less sense even to myself than the default configuration. And I am thinking that this would be 1000x more the case if I tried with emacs. > FWIW: eventually the default bindings tend to click and make sense, but the first impression can be brutal. well that is reassuring :)

Yes as you say I have noticed that the option to use "emacs keybindings" is available all over the place. I think it would be very convenient to have facility with. I am just trying to understand better if there is some reason for things being as they are, or some way to think about it. I did try using it but I found it very cumbersome.

Agree with the potential for maximum zaniness. These days I use a sub 40% keyboard and make heavy use of layers; long story short my arrow keys are on my home row similar to vim, so I just use those pretty happily. Before that though I went from C-[npfb] on QWERTY to colemak, and the mnemonic “[n]ext” “[b]ack” etc actually proved really helpful in relearning all my muscle memory.

You can use Shift+Insert for paste, Ctrl+Insert for copy, and Ctrl+Delete for cut. Those are just as standard as Ctrl+x/c/v (though not nearly as well known by users). There's also CUA mode, which lets you use the common Ctrl+x/c/v bindings in Emacs. It works surprisingly well. The Emacs Ctrl/Alt+w and Ctrl+y bindings were in place before Ctrl+x/c/v came into widespread use. Changing them and also making all users change at the same time unfortunately isn't feasible. But there are many alternative ways of handling it.

At this point I'm so used to the standard Emacs bindings that changing would take a lot of effort, but if I could learn Emacs again I'd seriously consider learning some other scheme—probably Evil?—for basically that reason. The nice thing with Emacs is that if you want to do something different *you can*. Doesn't have to be something as extreme as Evil, either—it's really easy to just change a bunch of keybindings if you feel like it. It would take a bit of extra work because a bunch of other navigation commands are organized around n, p, f, b but it's something you can do incrementally.

In addition to the Mastering Emacs blog, I think you may find this useful: [https://github.com/justbur/emacs-which-key](https://github.com/justbur/emacs-which-key).

\> "f" for forward, "b" for backwards, "n" for next line,"p" for previous seems counterintuitive Don't conflate what you know with what is intuitive. People coming from Vim to Emacs often have the same problem, they believe that what they already have learned is intuitive. Just because you are used to something doesn't automatically mean it is better. It takes time to rewire your brain, and yes, Emacs keybindings feel weird at first if you come from another environment. But many Emacs commands come from a time before there were GUI interfaces and the only mouse in the world was made of wood and sitting in Douglas Engelbart's lab at SRI. You can remap the keys to work more like they do in the Muggle world, but over time many people find that the Emacs keybindings have stood the test of time for a reason. It may take some patience to get to the lightbulb moment when you realize -- AH THAT'S why they do it that way. Keep in mind that Emacs is first and foremost a powerful text editor. If you think about it, most of what GUI applications are doing is manipulating text. This might be editing a file, but it might also be listing directories, invoking commands and changing settings in configuration files. Email is basically all text. Formatted HTML text might be pretty, and it's now ubiquitous, but in the end it's a distraction from what email is for; exchanging text messages. This is why there are several email clients for Emacs. Once you understand the power of Emacs to manipulate text, you will want to use that power all the time for anything that is, under the hood, just plain text. This is why long time Emacs users talk of "living in Emacs." once you've had a taste of that kind of power everything else feels like a flimsy toy by comparison. I suggest repeating the built in tutorial a couple of times until you can at least remember the keybindings. Use a paper notebook for listing commands as you learn them. Review your notes from time to time and weed out commands you don't use and remind yourself of useful commands that you forgot about. I did this for the first five years I used Emacs and it helps a lot. There are printable cheat sheets that are quite good, but the physical act of writing down commands as you use them will help you to remember them. This advice works with any large a complex application -- it is how I learned to use Power Animator (now Maya), and Softimage back in the day and later, Blender. Eventually you'll internalize how the program is structured and you won't need the notebook as much. But when you are starting it is a life saver! Don't worry about anything fancy -- concentrate on the commands you need to get something done. You can then learn more as you need them. Some people are determined to become power users as quickly as possible. There is no need -- you can be very productive using little more than the basic commands in the tutorial. When I first learned Emacs I had fallen into the bad habit of using a mouse for too many things. So I ran Emacs in a shell for the first month to ensure that I was not tempted to try to use Emacs the same way I used GUI apps. It sped up the learning curve for me considerably, YMMV. Finally, stick with it and make the effort to give yourself the time to rewire your brain. If you do, it will open a door to an amazing world that you never knew existed.

I am jealous; I wish I would be able to use one of those. Literally about 2 hours ago purchased myself a new kb + switches. TKL because it is the smallest that doesn't confuse me. I tried something a *bit* more compact but couldn't handle lack of navigation/fkeys and made myself crazy trying to learn the combos. Maybe if I learn emacs I will not need pg up/down etc so much. Anyway be grateful you are not a stupid person because life is tough when you require 87 keys to function. I wouldn't mind moving away from QWERTY especially as I learn more keyboard-centered computing, I can really see the benefits. Unfortunately I did this once in the past and found that it only works if you are able to have control and monopoly over all keyboards in your life. At work now (and probably forever) I am forced to use Windows machines I do not administer and sharing workstations is common so I can't do anything weird at all because it confuses others. For example I disabled the caps lock key because who needs caps lock? And at home I have it mapped to a modifier so I engage it by accident occasionally. But it turns out one of my co workers enables the caps lock instead of using the shift key *every time she types a capital letter* (!!!!) so I was making her bananas and had to re-enable it. So as a person who struggles to learn even one system I have to be careful, because I always need to keep "windows 10 default" or equivalent in front of mind. Maybe if emacs is totally different I won't even try to use it at work.

I believe evil is for vim users who feel that the vim keybindings are more comfortable. What most emacs users do is rebind the caps key to ctrl, regardless of evil or not. What I would recommend is if you don't like emacs keybindings, as rightfully so, to install evil and do the vim tutor in emacs. And if you want to get immediately productive in emacs, install doom emacs, it's really good!

"the idea that you navigate with "f" for forward, "b" for backwards, "n" for next line, "p" for previous seems counterintuitive" I've been using emacs since 1988. Never used these. Used arrow/cursor keys instead.

Yeah - I absolutely hate the super-minimal / layered keyboards. TKL all the way and lots of stuff assigned to function keys!

One of the biggest draws of a custom keyboard for me is that the key map is built into the device. If I have my keyboard I have my custom layout. Assuming, of course, your work doesn’t have a policy against that.

TKL is a good first step! it might take years before you feel that you might be happier with even less keys, but just keep at getting better and exploring the topic, because as you get older, and your joints degrade, it might become more important to further reduce finger travel!

neither is there a need for being hypersensitive! from the wiring style of OP I sense that they are perfectly fine with some sarcasm.

great explanation! I wish more ppl would take the time and introspect, like this, so they can convey their ideas more precisely. btw, spacial ordering of keys feel like a reduction in cognitive load. finger movements can become automatic somewhat faster. but these are indeed only issues, when you can't type blindly. I never thought I would be able to type blindly, but after 3-4 sessions, totalling 27 minutes, of using keybr.com I suddenly were able to touch-type (more or less, majority of the time). that's all I needed after 30+ years of non-touch-typing! so I'd say, if u practice even only 1-2 minutes 2-3 times a week, you will see incredible improvement in you typing skills! and if you work a lot with computers, it's totally worth the effort!

1. for cursor navigation, just use arrow keys first. 2. f/b/p/n becomes useful, and make more sense, when you need to combine with Meta and Control. eg at a minibuffer prompt u can often navigate the history with M-n/p 3. think of the keybindings as a language. it's practically like speaking English but it's "written" by mentioning the only first or other important letter of words. using M and C modifiers act like prosody, turning the same word from a statement into a question or an exclamation. 4. the important idea behind mnemonic based shortcuts is that they scale a lot better than spacial arrangement, which can only be helpful for a limited amount of operations. so Emacs basically ignores the benefit of spacially arranged shortcuts and instead have a coherent, mnemonic based system, covering a lot lot lot more operations. but since they support cursor keys by default too, I don't think there is a lot to complain about. 5. C/M-w & C/M-y wank and yank. pretty terminology. especially annoying that yank means the opposite in vim... 6. give a 2-3 months to learning Emacs bindings, even if you later go down there rocky road of evil-mode. a lot of it works in command-lines via the readline lib and across macOS. sometimes the programs have custom meanings for arrows, but C-p/n/f/b still works... so Emacs bindings is a "language" worth knowing. 7. I'm an active IntelliJ/Cursive user, but I would like to add Emacs to my skills. I'm studying and configuring Emacs for about 4 years now, but still not using it for work. What I did though is that I've signed Emacs bindings to some actions in IntelliJ, so I can practice them during work too, while retaining the existing bindings, so I'm not forced to practice. I'm 45 yo, but I still think the I will be programming for another 20-30 years, so it's worth investing into Emacs. imagine what would happen, if JetBrains somehow collapse? not so far fetched idea now, in the light of the Ukraine war... Emacs is a lot more distributed. so there's is that too.

Here is an old post that can help a little bit with some of the "conventions" and understanding. [https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/a5j3lc/emacs\_key\_binding\_conventions\_and\_why\_you\_should/](https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/a5j3lc/emacs_key_binding_conventions_and_why_you_should/) You think they are unintuitive and hard to remember at first. Then suddenly you're in reddit trying to edit some typos and you're creating new chrome windows and opening print dialogs....

Lol no policies about keyboards at all because it would never have occurred to anyone that a worker would ever do such a thing as bring a keyboard. Just consideration of others with whom I share space and tools; cannot make things difficult for them. My new kb has qmk which Ive wanted for a long time, but I think it will be for home only.

No. You should learn vi, maybe, sure. But emacs is its own animal, and you should learn it "as it is spoke", so to … uh … say. However, I've been using emacs since 1997, and I use M-{b,n,f,p} basically never, since I have perfectly-functional and intuitive arrow keys that do the job better.

> What most emacs users do is rebind the caps key to ctrl, regardless of evil or not. I doubt this is what "most emacs users do", and I don't think it's a best practice, even.

Yes you are correct I really should learn to touch type. I will investigate the website.

btw, I also found quite some of the defaults counterintuitive and wondered how they could be better, than what I'm used to. eventually settled on these settings, to lower the barrier to entry: https://github.com/onetom/onetomacs/blob/main/init.el#L6

I mean, you can do whatever you want! I can only speak through my own experience. I have tried vanilla Emacs keybindings several times, but I always come back to evil (I guess I'm evil inside) :)

Well, I do have CAPSLOCK as ESC on tap and LEFT_CTRL on hold and even ENTER as ENTER on tap and RIGHT_CTRL on hold by using [Interception](https://gitlab.com/interception/linux). (So CTRL is taken care of, now what should I do with META?). No matter, I always keep back to Evil, vanilla Emacs keybindings are just a pain for me. With Evil, I just *flow* over my keyboard, with vanilla Emacs I can only feel pain to accomplish anything, and I'm *very* slow.

I love vim, and modal editing, and love `doom` emacs (nice evil based package), but yeah that sounds like a... "ungood" plan. ;)

> The keys have no logical physical relationship to each other. an important note re this: it's a _very_ problematic perspective. Apologies if this doesn't come off as polite. I'm not trying to blame you. It's not your fault, but it's yet another case of a very _real_ problem. Why? because you, and I are unlikely to use the same keyboard. People from America, Japan, and Norway all use different keyboards. I use Dvorak. Some use Colemak. A 1 handed person might use Dvorak left/right handed. Someone using a chord keyboard is going to be using something _radically_ different than all of those. And then there's languages that have other character sets. The fact that so much software is designed for the American QWERTY keyboard is incredibly frustrating because of how it basically gives the finger to the rest of the world and tells them to "deal". So, when the keys your editor tells you to hit for something are not "ergonomic" you're experiencing what a LOT of the world experiences every day. In emacs defense, you can rebind them to something that works for you with your number of hands and fingers, your mobility, and your language, and your keyboard layout.

You are correct about the anglo chauvinism etc generally and I dont think you are on the wrong track trying to make people aware of experiences faced in the rest of the world. I agree with you that people who are closer to the imperial centre are often thoughtless when it comes to things being handed to them on a silver platter and take it for granted and not knowing how others are having to adapt to situations. Otoh I gotta say there is nothing here I am not aware of and if you scroll on the thread I already described in detail how keyboard layout, input devices, handedness and abilities are related to user experience. I was trying to be somewhat concise so it is not comprehensive but it is something that I have observed about. So what? Are you trying to say that everyone should suffer and nothing should make sense to anyone? Are you saying that emacs sucks equally for everyone? Or perhaps is there some logic to it that transcends my localisation and makes sense *big picture*? If I was trying to make the point that you are trying to make, I would probably include information about what other people *do* in these situations. As I think I may have said elsewhere, one problem I had with dvorak was that it interfered with kb shortcuts designed for qwerty. No news flash about that for me, I learned this many years ago. So how do you adapt? I would love to know more about how people using very different input devices manage. What good does pointing out a "problematic perspective" do? Am I supposed to feel bad and stop trying to make things functional for myself? I would be happy to learn to think globally in my computing but your comment contributes very little.

your response is fair, and my apologies for not reading all the responses first. > What good does pointing out a "problematic perspective" do? Am I supposed to feel bad and stop trying to make things functional for myself? I would be happy to learn to think globally in my computing but your comment contributes very little. No, you shouldn't feel bad. And my apologies for it coming across that way. My point, poorly expressed, was that you've walked into a metaphorical dress shop, picked up a dress, and commented aloud that it doesn't fit and wondered why someone would make a dress that was designed for someone else's shape. Yes, fit is an important criteria to you. Yes, you 100% should not have to wear a dress that doesn't fit. We are fortunate in this ..."dress shop" that everything is _incredibly_ adjustable and modifiable. This dress was shaped for someone else, but it's got enough fabric to fit you to if you want to spend the time to adjust it. I obviously.... could have read better, and should not have responded with frustration over this issue that is not your fault. That being said, I think there are better questions to be asked here. 1. Is it reasonable to try and tailor this to my needs? 2. How do I tailor this to fit my needs? 3. What do I have to watch out for when doing so? I think the answer to 1 is yes, 2 is fairly well documented, and 3 is not something I can answer. -- Separately: > So how do you adapt? I would love to know more about how people using very different input devices manage. I think that's a very good, but very different question. For me... I left the keybindings as they were and got used to using multiple hands for things that were on-handed in Qwerty. Dvorak is worth the tradeoff for me. It gives me ergonomics, and lowers wrist strain, and is available on every computer I go to. The thinking was that more esoteric layouts would be more benefit, but harder if i needed to use someone else's computer. In practice, i just use Qwerty when on other people's computers. 🤷‍♀️ I also use doom so I have no idea what the normal emacs keybindings are for most things I do. ;)

I've seen you insisting on "do it the emacs way" in Evil threads, then you say arrow keys do a better job than `M-{b,f,d}`, etc??? Lol... What??! Love it, bro...classic. No wonder you assert that software shouldn't be customized, Emacs pinky isn't a thing, etc etc etc etc. (You're mashing on the arrow keys in your Chrome browser editing a response now, aren't you? 😂😂)

IMO, it's a considerable investment. For those who work on source code or write for a living (or for those who are just curious or love amazing things), etc., it makes sense to commit the time and energy. Be careful, though! ...It's addictive and it's an endless world of rabbit holes. There's nothing quite like it. Maybe start by using org-mode to manage something meaningful in your life and see where it goes from there?

Sorry, that wasn't nice. Let Emacs users do what makes them happy... :-)

Do you use Org agenda and the export dispatcher? That’s a real life example of those mnemonics being used.

I may add, some maps show as “+prefix” in which-key. You can add an alias to your preferred prefixes to show a better name.

If I’m using a command or package that I very rarely use, I either use mouse/menus or C-h m to see all the commands for the current mode and then maybe M-x. There’s zero point in trying to remember key bindings you use once per year.

I would expect a long time user to use Org for like everything, I seriously couldn’t work reasonably well without Org mode. However if you don’t, then that’s a good reason not to remember these.

As a dvorak user I rebind movement with "f" and "b" to "j" and "p" , is rather nice, I can use C-j/p when I want to move by words and j/p when letters. I don't rebind the vertical movement ones which would be in qwerty C-r and C-l. OBS:Consider j,p,l,r in qwerty.

I use evil too I can understand lol, but as I learn emacs more and more, I tend to use the emacs keybindings rather than bind them to a vim like keybinding

I’ll be honest: at the beginning I used almost no keybindings at all, but I did used Helm A LOT. Particularly, `helm-M-x` bound to `M-x`. This allows you to add searches so you search “org clock” and get a full list of commands containing both org and clock. Should these commands have keybindings, they are shown too. That way I started using some keybindings for my most precious tasks. At first, I defined tons of shitty bindings in my init.el, but then I slowly adopted a lot of the vanilla bindings as a more sensible solution. I learnt that p, n, f and b are widely used as mnemonics, but I don’t use these to navigate most of the time. Some bindings were crap for me, so I gave them a better use. About evil, it doesn’t work for me, and it’s not well documented. However if it works for you, go ahead. Anyways, you will end up by having your own Emacs, and that is good. Just keep in mind that most of the community efforts are on vanilla, so shift too much and you’ll have less and less support. As a counterpart, as you get more mature, you give more and more a f*ck about lack of support too, and start giving support to others. So learn a lot, because we all need more people knowing Emacs.

I feel like it's more likely emacs users rebind caps lock to control than curling their pinky or using the palm-side knuckle of their hand to hit Ctrl.

I feel like it's more likely people /very slightly/ shift their arm to hit control in its normal placement then do any of those 3 things. Which is what I do, and what anyone who uses control-chords on windows does /all the time/.

I use evil, because I use tridactyl on firefox and qutebrowser and vim on remote servers. Also a lot of tools has vim bindings and emacs is not possible, because they conflicts with default for this tools. Like firefox for example. So i decided to invest into vim-like style and I'm very productive right now

> the important idea behind mnemonic based shortcuts is that they scale a lot better than spacial arrangement, which can only be helpful for a limited amount of operations. so Emacs basically ignores the benefit of spacially arranged shortcuts and instead have a coherent, mnemonic based system, covering a lot lot lot more operations. OK I think this might be the sort of idea I was trying to find at. If eventually it starts to make sense in the big picture I would be happy and it would be worthwhile. I have tried enforcing some sort of universal logic on my system piece by piece but I can't come up with anything that doesn't suck. > give a 2-3 months to learning Emacs bindings [...] I'm studying and configuring Emacs for about 4 years now, but still not using it for work. lol do not know what to say to that! I think after 4 years you have done enough studying. go for it!

I already have `caps` rebound as `ctrl` as it is way more comfortable. :) If I wasn't compelled to use windows at work I would have a much different modifier set up. But back when I was going back and forth between windows and default mac layout (with `cmd` being immediately to left/right of spacebar) it led to constant errors at work activating all kinds of things with `alt` keys accidentally. So I try to keep mac and linux basics aligned with windows. It's annoying.

I find using ctrl keys a lot really hurts my hand and LOVE having reboud caps to ctrl. especially when I am doing something requiring a lot of ctrl-F and ctrl-G like prolonged web research. I have small hands and fingers though so maybe it makes a difference.

Oh it is autocomplete? Or suggestions more accurately? That would be great. I will save it for when I know how to install things like this.

that post directly addresses my question! I knew somebody (probably many somebodies) would have laid it out at some point.

Pass it forward!

Well I don't think it is reasonable to say someone body has to read whole thread before commenting, especially if I am OP because concision is not my strong suit an it would be very tedious. I was thinking more to show evidence that I had considered the concept before. Which might make me look even dumber and more willfully ignorant eh. And thank you for mentioning chord keyboard because when I was a kid my friend's dad had one and he was showing us and explaining how you could type really fast on it, but then years later I was thinking of it but never able to find anything on it. I had though maybe it was just some kind of weird custom gizmo he made for himself or something. So that mystery is finally solved.

> Oh it is autocomplete? Not exactly. As you no doubt have learned from the tutorial, Emacs's keybindings include many prefix keys. The biggest one is C-x. But there are others: C-h, C-c, M-g, M-s, etc. It's one thing to learn the first level keybindings for navigation and such. But then there are all the keys underneath the prefix keys too! (And even prefix keys under prefix keys, and so on...) Which-key makes this easier by showing you a pop-up listing of keybindings whenever you pause after pressing a prefix key like C-x. So if you know that a command starts with C-x, you simply press C-x and wait a moment to see the list.

The [CharaChorder](https://www.charachorder.com/) is the current state of the art AFAIK and is a dramatic advancement over the chord keyboards of yesteryear.

they make a keyboard where you can just mash all the keys and it will put them in the right order... that is already how I type; I guess I am in the future here. ~~But speaking of internationalization do you have to install hardware drivers for languages or what?~~ Oh nevermind I found the answer, it is YES. The few supported languages are in a [google doc](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vSGHdVSGXzPjEBvI6uMoKU6VI1iqH8YHveFCo0iOpLvIUbwNtfeIqLhzGKasJdgRVOmQN3Qk2aZFPtm/pubhtml?gid=1848741657&single=true). One person requested dvorak. what does that even mean? What about non dictionary words? In some contexts I am using >10% non dictionary words. Do you put your custom spellcheck dictionary into the hardware? This website does not have nearly enough information. I feel like the kind of person who would be interested in buying this would also be the kind of person who'd appreciate a lengthy FAQ about things other than shipping times but maybe I am just projecting.

Wait don't you need to know how to use emacs to use org mode?

this sounds like good advice. > Just keep in mind that most of the community efforts are on vanilla, so shift too much and you’ll have less and less support. I agree and I have in other situations ended up in confusing messes of my own making due to excessively bespoke set ups that are beyond my understanding. Then you can't even ask for help because it's impossible to describe the operating environment. This is why tbh it seems dumb to me the people who answered the question by suggesting I remap to whatever I want. Obviously that is possible but what are the odds it will work long term? basically nil. may as well tell a person to fuck off instead of giving advice that bad, it would be less wasteful of everybody's time.

Not really... You could start to learn Emacs by using Org mode! Watch a tutorial for Org or whatever's clever. I don't really use org that much and it always triggers my claustrophobia, so maybe it's a terrible idea. Was just trying to think of a useful project that would get you using Emacs on the side.. get your feet wet. :)