Re: Help Line Text

Benno Schulenberg <[email protected]> Sun, 23 Feb 2020 13:42:39 +0100
Newsgroups	gmane.editors.nano.general
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
Op 21-02-2020 om 18:55 schreef [email protected]:
> By the way, what exactly do I need to type into the .nanorc file to rebind
> something to the escape key?

The <Esc> key cannot be rebound.  Its code is the starting code of escape
sequences, things that most non-symbol keys normally produce.  Yes, in theory
<Esc> could be made rebindable, but at the cost of not being able to recognize
any escape sequence any more.  That is not an acceptable trade-off.

> As for reordering the shortcuts and perhaps displaying different ones in
> different orders in the help lines, I thought it would be nice to only display
> the shortcuts I rarely use there.

I understand now.  However, the order in which the shortcuts are listed
is baked hard into nano -- the order in the help lines is also the order
in the corresponding help text (^G).  There has not been any demand or
suggestion so far to make this order configurable, nor even any suggestion
to improve the order or selection of shortcuts that are displayed by default.

I am not going to look into making the order configurable (too much work),
but if you have well-thought-out suggestions for a better order/selection
of shortcuts that would maximize the usefulness of those two help lines for
novices, then please post your suggestions to nano-devel -- that is the list
for proposing changes to nano.

> As I mentioned before, I rebound my most commonly used shortcuts to what I have
> already memorised, but the other ones which I rarely use I left on default.

As an aside: a disadvantage of making your custom bindings is that, when
you are on someone else's computer, or ssh to another machine, or run from
a live USB stick, you will be working with a default nano and you will quite
likely mistype things if you've grown accustomed to your own bindings.

I think if will pay off in the end if you learn to live with most of nano's
default bindings.  (Also because nano's ^K isn't really like ^X in other
editors -- it cuts the current line when nothing is selected.  Using ^K for
this is a nice reminder of this fact.)

> For instance, it would be much more useful for me to see prompts on the help
> lines such as "^T Spell Check", or "M-B Syntax Check" (the ones which I rarely
> use and have not memorised) so that I can use them when I need them,

Out of curiosity: do you ever use M-B?  If yes, for what kind of files?

Benno
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