You know, for some of us Emacs isn’t a program — its the guiding force in life (well, maybe I’m going a little overboard… then again, maybe not).

The problem with getting those Emacs commands ingrained in your head (or your fingers) is that you then have to use other programs! It is very painful to use Word or an IDE without those Emacs keystrokes.

I’m writing this on a Windows box using Firefox in a Blogger HTML editor. But guess what? Control+A takes me to the start of the line, Control+W cuts, and Control+Y pastes! Why? I’m running xkeymacs, a nice free program that lets you map Emacs keystrokes for Windows applications.

It does take a little work to get everything just right. For example, I added ^X-0 (zero) to send Firefox a Control+W which closes the current tab. ^X-2 can create a new tab. It is a little tricky to add new things (but not too bad, you just have to edit a text file with a lisp-like syntax). You also need to set it up so each program has its own settings (which means you can disable it for certain programs, or change Control+W to send escape (for Thunderbird, for example).

You can find xkeymacs here: http://www.cam.hi-ho.ne.jp/oishi/indexen.html

If you prefer just “fixing” Office applications, you might try: http://www.rath.ca/Misc/VBacs/

Oh, and if you don’t think Emacs is powerful enough, here’s some food for thought: http://www.informatimago.com/linux/emacs-on-user-mode-linux.html