Emacs and the missing 'g'

Matt Armstrong marmstrong at google.com
Tue Feb 12 21:04:56 PST 2019


I'm returning to notmuch after a hiatus.  It is still nice!

First thing I've noticed: the Emacs modes seem to ignore the 'g' key.  I
would like to bind it (by default) to the relevant "refresh" commands.
I'll explain.

notmuch-hello mode leaves 'b' bound to self-insert-command, and
notmuch-search mode does as well.

Most notmuch modes are "special" modes -- i.e. their text is generated
by Emacs and does not reflect a file.  In these modes 'g' has
traditionally been bound to revert the buffer [1].

You see this across many modes: dired, vc, gnus, etc.

I was actually going to report this as a bug until I realized that
notmuch consistently uses '=' for the same thing.

Any objection to also binding 'g'?


For context, here is the list of other bindings in a "special" mode
(from Emacs' simple.el).  Notmuch already follows some of these (such as
<, > and q).

    SPC             scroll-up-command
    -               negative-argument
    0 .. 9          digit-argument
    <               beginning-of-buffer
    >               end-of-buffer
    ?               describe-mode
    g               revert-buffer
    h               describe-mode
    q               quit-window
    DEL             scroll-down-command
    S-SPC           scroll-down-command

[1] (elisp) Basic Major Modes


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