Having learned that bash (or readline) uses emacs-like keybindings to move cursors around, and having problems going to start-of-line or end-of-line by pressing HOME and END when sshed to the Mac, I googled for emacs key bindings and stumbled upon Emacs Makes You Retarded. If you can’t be bothered to read the article, basically the guy says that once you learn how to get by in an idiosyncratic system, you’ll tend to prefer it over clearly more sensible systems, simply because your brain-finger-results path is so much lower-resistance in the system you are used to. I guess this is why hostages fall in love with their captors, and why people stay in unhealthy relationships.

These poor sods are stuck in a world of ctrl-a for start-of-line (never mind the HOME key) ctrl-e for end-of-line (END anyone?) and odd sequences of multiple keypresses to achieve such things as saving and loading.

Although I’m heading the other way (I want to know what these arcane key sequences are because they’ll solve the problem of moving the cursor on my Mac). I philanthropically conceived of a wonderful piece of rehabilitative code:

demacs: detox for emacs users.

It’s emacs, but it also supports sane keypresses - where keys that are found on nearly all keyboards actually do what they say on the caps - and supports shortcuts that are more consistent with Windows (or consistent with a fond memory of how Windows used to be consistent)

Here’s the clincher though: all the emacs bindings work, but they each have a 0.25-0.5 second delay on them, and they all display the “better” key in the status bar or somewhere nice. So you can have your old habits and work just fine, but you are constantly motivated and educated to change your ways.

This is not really a new concept: I seem to remember Microsoft did it in Word ages back; whenever you pressed a key that a WordPerfect user would have pressed, it would do it, but nag you at the same time.

The irony is, you could probably implement all of this as a set of emacs macros, only anyone who knows enough emacs macrology to do it is unlikely to think that HOME and END are a better idea anyway.

Dammit, I didn’t manage to get my “vi-sexual” joke in.