Preventing Errant Navigation

I often press C-<end> or C-<next> accidentally. It's annoying and disorientating because I lose my place in the document as well as my train of thought. I think of them (a bit dramatically) as "Deadly Navigation Keys." But I discovered two valuable Emacs features to make it easy to recover from them (or prevent them) as a result.

The first valuable feature is that C-<end> (which is bound to end-of-buffer) sets the mark at the cursor location prior to setting point to the end of the buffer. (I only just realized this after seeing the message "Mark set" in the minibuffer about fifty times.)

There's an almost-applicable saying, "What goes up, must come down," except in this case I'd say, "What gets pushed, may be popped." A simple invocation of C-h a pop.+mark revealed the pop-to-mark-command. And then, happily, M-x pop-to-mark-command returned me to exactly where I left off. It was the undo feature that Emacs had been missing -- a sort of undo-cursor-motion.

Recovering from beginning-of-buffer is just as easy. It, too, pushes mark.

There are, however, other Deadly Navigation Keys that do not push mark. In fact, they don't even change the position of the cursor. Instead, they scroll the buffer. I'm referring to scroll-left and scroll-right . These are disabled by default. However, I figured that only babies needed to shielded from such commands, so I enabled them.

Holy cow was that a mistake! On my laptop keyboard, the page down and right arrow keys are crammed very close together. I often press C-<right> to advance one word, but that's only 1 cm away from C-<next>, which is bound to scroll-left. And scroll-left alters the view of the buffer such that all the content I been work on shifts off screen. The first time it happened, I freaked, of course, and then I checked the status bar to see if the buffer had been modified. (It hadn't.) So I closed Emacs entirely and restarted it. Then I re-disabled scroll-left and scroll-right.

But then it occurred to me to disable end-of-buffer and beginning-of-buffer, too, because I rarely use those functions, and if I really need to call them, all I'd have to do is press the spacebar after each C-<end>. Disabling a command is a convenient way of seeking confirmation without making the user type "yes" (or "y").

What commands do you have disabled? And why?