Emacs key mappings for Xamarin Studio on Mac

One of the great things about my job instructing at Xamarin is the diverse set of questions I get exposure to via all the people who attend Xamarin University.

For example, just the other day I was in a class with a guy by the name of Richard Logwood who was curious about Emacs key bindings for Xamarin Studio.

I’m not an Emacs guys (I’ve only got 10 fingers)  and so it’s not something I’ve personally looked into.   But Richard emailed me back to share some info he found about configuring Emacs bindings.

 

Hi Kym,

Enjoyed your class so much, thank you!

Writing to share, giving back a little. You’ll recall my interest in Emacs key mappings for Xam Studio on Mac. I was working to set this up today and ran into some difficulties (couldn’t remap Control-A and Control-V as they kept being interpreted Command-A and Command-V in the re-mapper).

While I’m not/wasn’t sure if this is on my side (didn’t make sense as I was able to map other Control key combinations without a problem); I started digging into my own Mac setup, which doesn’t get enough attention.

I double checked all my modifier key settings in User Prefs and then took a close look at my Karabiner (https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/) setup. In so doing I discovered some very nice pre-configured settings to create Emacs bindings across the Mac for every application!

Another nice feature I found was the ability to configure the key repeat and delay parameters, which have always been annoyingly slow for me on the Mac.

See the attached screen shot below.

Cheers,
Richard

 

So I thought i would share it here in case anyone else is crazy enough to try and configure Emacs bindings for Xamarin Studio.

Thanks for sharing Richard, and my hat goes off to you for your commitment to Emacs!

I do love the Xamarin Community!