Question

What are the best and worst emacs key bindings in development software? Ever since I learned it, I find myself trying to use C-p and C-n to move up and down in everything that has a text box on it.

I’m perpetually annoyed by software that has an emacs mode that’s pretty obviously either put together by someone who’s never used emacs before or it’s done in a crappy manner. So let’s recognize the winners and losers in this thread.

Answer 1

A Valiant attempt

Eclipse Emacs bindings are decent when editing. In some dialog boxes, however, they mysteriously break and copy reverts to C-c and paste to C-v. An irritation.

A nice Mac OS Bonus

On Mac OS, all Cocoa applications support basic emacs key bindings. This works out quite well because native Mac apps don’t use the control key for anything so there’s no chance of conflict. This also means that you can pick up almost any text editor (or word processor) on the Mac and have at least basic Emacs keys.

An unexpected Benefit

This even means that Oxygen (an XML editor using the Swing GUI toolkit) supports Emacs keybindings, but only on the mac. I assume this is the case because Apple is actually using a heavyweight (Cocoa) text widget to implement the Swing text widget in their LAF.

On other platforms, I often use the Eclipse plugin version of Oxygen just to get my keybindings back.

Ugly

G^%$&^% F^%$ StackOverflow for overriding some of the Cocoa Emacs bindings with some Javascript crap on the Mac. Very annoying.

C-k (kill-line)     is bound to (insert-this-crap `print('code sample');`) C-b (backward-char) is bound to (insert-this-crap **strong text**) C-e, C-a, C-p, C-f, C-n work as expected. 

These SO shortcuts are neither documented, nor do they appear to be customizable. They also aren’t particularly useful.

Reported as a bug here: http://stackoverflow.uservoice.com/pages/general/suggestions/72686