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301 points nogajun | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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giancarlostoro ◴[] No.45942664[source]
I would love to see a project that rebuilds the Emacs UI but keeps the underlying core to give it a modern facelift, some things in emacs blend together and are a pain for my eyes to figure out whats what. It would be nice if the UI was modernized but the core was left as-is. I'm reminded of some of my favorite editors that are niche being Lisp related ones, where if you held down ctrl it would show you shortcuts in the UI itself and what they lead to. I also always enjoyed Racket's import arrows and other small things that are visually amazingly impressive despite being so simple.
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pama ◴[] No.45942710[source]
You mean something like which-key? It existed for a long time as an external package and was added to main emacs recently. https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/commit/fa4203300fde682...
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setopt ◴[] No.45943443[source]
As far as I know, which-key only helps with key sequences. If you press C-c in Org-mode it will show you keys like C-c C-e, but if you hold Ctrl down it won’t show you C-RET for example.
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1. iLemming ◴[] No.45960239{3}[source]
Emacs can't do that for historic reasons. It just can't distinguish between keypress and keyup events. It receives input events from the terminal/OS. Terminals are text-oriented: They evolved to transmit characters, not hardware events.

It's not some technical impossibility - I think it would make sense to make this possible, at least in GUI Emacs. I suppose there was never a strong incentive to tackle this problem.