emacs keybindings OOo Writer vs. MS Word

[peterm]

When (if ever) will oowriter give decent support for those of us who have emacs keybindings hard wired? Recently, I've been forced by my job to use a MSword compatible word processor and the main source of pain are the cursor movement keybindings and cut/copy/paste, save, search, open and close buffers. I did manage to get a few of them via tools->customize->keyboard, but to my great surprise, I found that I could get MUCH closer to an emacs-feel to the wp editor in MSword than in oowriter!!

I really hate giving MS my mindshare on this and I'd really rather be using an open source package under GNU/Linux, but I can't get around the emacs thing. Is the demand for emacs keybindings in oowriter really so low that MS is the better option for those forced to use a wysiwg word processor?

[Villeroy]

Scandal! Emacs user complains about weird keystrokes
I don't believe there is a common target audience between emacs and vi on one side and word processors on the other side except for working slaves pressed into one or the other paradigm. You'll get the most of an application when you adjust yourself to it. The other way round is quite limited. There are so many features in emacs you won't find in a word processor and emacs has so many shortcuts that are not possible in OOo (everything with Meta key). Why not write in emacs (which is by far easier, indeed), copy the finished plain text to Writer and do the formatting via styles?
Oh, wait a moment. Writer comes with a xslt filter for docbook. See Tools>XML Settings... Never used that. Possibly this may help you to work with the program you really like and then import into what your boss likes.

[TheGurkha]

Scandal! Emacs user complains about weird keystrokes

<speechless>

[peterm]

I would very much like to use oowriter instead of MSword. I prefer open to closed source applications, even though I wouldn't dare to go down to the source code to make it the way I like it. But the emacs keybindings are VERY important to me. Not all of them, but cursor motion, cut, copy, paste, search, and undo are the biggies. Everything else is sugar. I haven't tabulated all the conversions I'm able to make, but I was able to do many more in Word. And that bums me out because MS is a fickle master that can change everything without warning (ie vista) but OO (at least in principal) is capable of improvement and is more likely to take community input. But it's too frustrating to have the app do weird things when I type Ctrl-a or Ctrl-e. So for now I have to cave in and use word. I hope I can come back to OO in the future.

[TheGurkha]

Why not write in emacs (which is by far easier, indeed), copy the finished plain text to Writer and do the formatting via styles?

As Villeroy suggested, you could do your input into Emacs and then copy the text into OOo for the format / print phase? Not the ideal, but a good compromise, perhaps?

Each to his own and all that, but I think you might be restricting yourself a bit if you try to only use applications with Emacs-emulations in them.

[pfaffman]

Why not write in emacs (which is by far easier, indeed), copy the finished plain text to Writer and do the formatting via styles?

Because I most often use OOo when I am collaborating with someone who is also using a word processor. If I use OOo only for producing a final document for submission to a journal, it's not that big a deal, but alas, the biggest reason I use OOo is to collaborate with other people (and sometimes Google docs doesn't cut it).

I do sometimes open .odt files in emacs and edit content.xml with emacs, but that too is bothersome because OOo puts in lots of XML that (appears to me) to be unnecessary and doesn't have any whitespace in it (which makes some sense since it'd unnecessarily increase file size), which makes it difficult to edit. And even then, if I botch something in the XML OOo can't read it anymore.

A way to remap keybindings would be really nice and, it would seem, useful for people who use alternate keyboards, for example.

[TheGurkha]

I see.

I guess you could post a suggestion (if it doesn't already exist) as described here: [Tutorial] Reporting bugs or suggestions.

(We're not the developers - just other users.)

[donoo]

I've just posted my attempt at using the customize keyboard interface to approximate emacs key bindings at
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=4183

I hope posting it here makes it more findable by others who want it.