3. A word about the keys used by ILISP

By default, most ILISP commands are bound under the prefix key C-z. Unfortunately, these bindings predate the modern FSF Emacs keyspace policies, which stipulate that packages should use C-c as a prefix, and bind only control characters, digits, and a few specific punctuation chars under that prefix.

If you are already accustomed to the old ILISP bindings, don't worry -- we haven't changed the default. However, for new users who don't have old habits to unlearn, ILISP offers FSF-compliant bindings as an alternative to the default. To be compliant (and who wouldn't want to be compliant?), put this line in your `.emacs' or in the system-wide `default.el' file:

   (setq ilisp-*use-fsf-compliant-keybindings* t)

This will cause the ILISP prefix key to be C-c, and also change some of the bindings underneath that prefix. After you do this, ILISP will be almost fully FSF-compliant; there are still a few bindings that technically violate the FSF policy, but we left them as they were because we judged that changing them would not have been an improvement.

Because the rest of this document was originally written for the old, default ILISP bindings, you'll need to make some mental translations if you choose FSF-compliance:

• Everywhere you see C-z given as a prefix key, substitute C-c.

• If the second part of the keybinding is a plain alphabetic character, the modern binding is (usually) the same character with the Control key held down. Thus, the old keybinding (given in full) C-z w would be C-c C-w in the new system.

• If the second part of the keybinding is already a Control character, then translate it to the corresponding Meta character instead (because many of the former control characters were evicted by the change described in the previous item). Thus, the old C-z C-n is now C-c M-n.

Where possible, the new bindings follow the above rules, but note that some exceptions were necessary. Most notably, the old C-c * bindings are all under C-c 8 now. The remaining exceptions are probably best discovered through regular use, as they tend to occur on obscure keys anyway. Remember that you can type C-h m at any time to see help on the current major mode, which will show (among other things) a list of all currently active keybindings.

This document was generated by XEmacs shared group account on December, 19 2009 using texi2html 1.65.