Emacs Love Tale by sdp
I&#x27;m an old-timer, having used emacs for 41 (!) years.  I started in a LISP class at MIT, but I was always a UNIX-lover so ended up using Gosling&#x27;s UNIX emacs throughout the 1980&#x27;s, and when that ended I borrowed gosmacs.el and wrote a short .emacs to kept Gosling&#x27;s emacs alive as Richard Stallman descended further and further into madness, breaking CTRL-h and trying to create thousands of functions keys ...<p>I have never done &quot;chording&quot;.  What is that?<p>I don&#x27;t need an editor with more than about 100 function keys (CRTL-[a-z], CTRL-[A-Z], ESC-[a-z], ESC-[A-Z]).<p>I absolutely hate &#x27;info&#x27; and in the age of manpages and webpages it is an embarrassment to emacs.<p>I absolutely love ESC-j (fill-region) for squeezing text into 77 columns, and ESC-x indent-region for unifying my coding style.  Modern shells understand at least 20 emacs key-bindings (CTRL-e, CTRL-a, CTRL-k, CTRL-b, CTRL-f, CTRL-d, etc.) and so does the Chrome browser, apparently.<p>Mostly these days I am turning off modes written by pedants who want to &#x27;force&#x27; me to do things I don&#x27;t want to do.  ESC-x text-mode works just fine for that.