So, finally, I'm blogging on Emacs. Over the years I've collected quite a few Emacs tips worth to share with others. I hope blogging will make me improve my .emacs.d and I'll end up creating a few packages, so hopefully Emacs community will benefit too. First my post is dedicated to keybindings, precisely the package called key-seq.

If you have been interested in ability to run commands inside Emacs with fewer keys than traditionally long Emacs keybindings require you must have heard about key-chord. If you didn't, briefly, key-chord allows you to map any two keys to a command. The command will be executed only if you press keys quickly. It's reasonable to bind the keys that rarely appear together.

For key-chord it doesn't matter in which order you press keys. For someone it may sound like a good idea. Though this drastically reduces the amount of key pairs that are "safe" to use. By "safe" I mean those key pairs that are almost never appear together in your writings (texts, code, etc.) For example, in English letter q is almost always followed by u (the notable exception for programmers is ql pair as it may stand for "query language"). So for me it sounds reasonable to use q as a prefix. But since key-chord defines key pairs in both specified order and in reverse, it will also execute commands for unwanted key pairs.

So the solution is obvious: modify key-chord so it produces only a single binding. I've used these slightly modified functions for a few years and now decided to create a package called key-seq to simplify installation for others and submitted it to MELPA.

If you installed key-chord and key-seq manually than you need load them first (you can skip this step if you installed both from MELPA or different package archive):

(require 'key-chord)
(require 'key-seq)

key-seq requires active key-chord-mode to work. So first load the mode globally:

(key-chord-mode 1)

Now you can define key pairs as follows:

(key-seq-define-global "qd" 'dired)
(key-seq-define-local "qc" 'compile)
(key-seq-define text-mode-map "qf" 'flyspell-buffer)

Unset key sequences as follows:

(key-seq-unset-global "qd")
(key-seq-unset-local "qc")
(key-seq-define text-mode-map "qf" nil)

For customizations use key-chord-* variables. For example, you can slightly increase delays:

(setq key-chord-two-keys-delay 0.2)
(setq key-chord-one-key-delay 0.3)

That's all. Hope you will find this package useful!

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