5 lines
1.5 KiB
Plaintext
5 lines
1.5 KiB
Plaintext
<p>One of the things you often want to know is what keybindings are available for the current buffer. Emacs, of course, has a command for that: <code>describe-bindings</code>, bound to <kbd>Ctrl</kbd>+<kbd>h</kbd> <kbd>b</kbd>. I never use it.</p>
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<p>The problem is that it outputs too much garbage in an unhelpful way. Lars Ingebrigtsen has noticed this too an decided to <a href="https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2021/11/06/a-more-readable-c-h-b/">do something about it</a>. Part of the problem is that the original code was written in C making it hard for many to work on. Happily, it’s recently been refactored in Elisp so changes are easier. Ingebrigtsen took advantage of that to prettify the output and put the relevant information at the top.</p>
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<p>In Ingebrigtsen’s post you can see side-by-side comparisons of the old versus Ingebrigtsen’s updated version. The best news is that the changes are already on trunk in the Git Emacs repository so we should be seeing them soon.</p>
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<p>The <code>describe-bindings</code> function has been in Emacs for a long time without much change but now it’s been significantly revised. This story—and many others like it—put the lie to the ignorant assertions on social media that Emacs is old and dead. It may be old, for software, but it’s far from dead. Indeed, even ancient and relatively unimportant parts of it are candidates for improvement.</p>
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<p>And, of course, thanks to Ingebrigtsen for bringing us this improvement.</p> |