I first saw the ability to give OS X Emacs key bindings on gnufoo.org. It looks as if they got this completely from an Apple document. Now these are all great and dandy, but for some reason Control-A and Control-E do not go to the beginning and end of line, respectively. By default, they go to the beginning and end of a paragraph. These two key bindings, along with Control-N and Control-P, are so burned into my memory that I subconsciously use them all the time. If I didn’t figure out how to get them working, it would constantly drive me mad. I don’t think it’s physically possible for me to unlearn this behavior. Sure enough, it was just a matter of adding the following two lines to the DefaultKeyBindings.dict:

        "^e"="moveToEndOfLine:";
        "^a"="moveToBeginningOfLine:";

And now I am a very happy man, indeed!

While I haven’t played with it too much, it’s nice to know that you can even setup ESC to be a prefix character, as in the second example in the Apple document.

Now if only I could get uControl working on OS X 10.3.3 to turn Caps Lock into Control, I will be in Emacs heaven. uControl 1.4.3 doesn’t work, even though it says it should. The installer quits saying it cannot install itself on OS X 10.3.3. Ah well, I’m sure this will be fixed in due time. If I get motivated enough, I may even try to hack the code.