XKeymacs

Someone told me not long ago if I had ever tried XKeymacs and I had never heard of it. You can follow the link and read about it, but it’s a Windows app that remaps the keyboard to Emacs keys. IOW, if you do C-n, you go to the next line. C-k kills the line and C-y yanks it back.

After using it a few hours, I thought, “How did I get by without this?” Because now I am using Emacs keys in almost all of my applications. I say “Almost” because there are some that I am too used to their keystrokes so that the Emacs command really mess things up. But you can tweak them — for example, I like having some Emacs keystrokes in FireFox, especially when I’m writing blog entries. :) But Emacs uses C-t, while I like to use FireFox’s C-t to create a new tab. Luckily, XKeymacs let’s you choose an app and let’s you choose if you want all the Emacs keys, none of the, or it let’s you pick and choose. So now I can use C-p, C-n, C-y, etc. while writing in a Textbox but still use C-t to create a new tab!

Imagine what it can do for Lotus Notes, Word, and other apps that we don’t like to use but still have oto

I still have some tweaking to do, but XKeymacs is becoming a must-have app for me!

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