What about more generic bindings for the arrow keys in xah-fly-command-map

[dvdkhlng]

Hi,

trying to get used to xah-fly-keys for one or two months now. Working on large projects, most of the load on hand/arms seems to come from navigating and looking up stuff, and not so much from typing, so this is what I'm currently focusing on.

My current keyboard: Truly Ergonomic Cleave does not have the arrow keys easily reachable, so having arrow key navigation in the xah-fly-command-map is quite helpful. However, in many special modes, especially minibuffer sutff like ido-find-file, isearch, ido-switch-buffer, various helm commands, the xah-fly-command-map's bindings for (dvorak) t,n,h,c directly invoke backward/forward char resp. line, which does not make sense in those contexts.

What I'm currently experimenting with, is to make those command-map "arrow keys" always trigger the current binding of the corresponding <up>, <left>, <down>, <right> keys. This seems to work, but the code does look ugly and I wonder whether there are cleaner ways to achieve this and what the downsides are (my elisp is a little rusty).

E.g. here is my (incomplete but working) example code for the up/down arrows, which is already enough to navigate e.g. in helm-occur:

(defun dk-arrow-up ()
  "Do what <Up> would do."
  (interactive)
  (call-interactively (key-binding [up])))

(defun dk-arrow-down ()
  "Do what <Down> would do."
  (interactive)
  (call-interactively (key-binding [down])))

(xah-fly--define-keys xah-fly-command-map
                      '(
                        ("t" . dk-arrow-down)
                        ("c" . dk-arrow-up))) 

An alternative would be to have a long cond block in the up/down etc. commands that invokes different functions depending on mode. In general, I think for efficiency's sake, some of the bindings in the command-map need to be used for different purpose depending on mode. Like when helm offers actions to run via the function keys F1..Fn, command map bindings for cut/copy/paste etc. are not needed and maybe should make room for easier reachable helm command invokation.

I think all this would be much easier to implement and talk about, if emacs key bindings were able to match on any mode/state information (command mode acting like a sticky modifier key). Then I could e.g. directly put bindings into the helm keymaps, that are specific to command mode.

[dvdkhlng]

See also my thoughts commented on #133 on using key remapping instead of minor mode keymaps to turn command mode into a sticky "Hyper" modifier. The t,n,h,c arrow keys could just be directly remapped to arrow keys from inside key-translation-map when command-mode active.