A little while back, as part of my ongoing effort to get better at using emacs, I added the following lines to my .emacs file, as recommended by Editing Lisp Code with Emacs
(define-key slime-mode-map (kbd "C-t") 'transpose-sexps)
(define-key slime-mode-map (kbd "C-M-t") 'transpose-chars)
(define-key slime-mode-map (kbd "C-b") 'backward-sexp)
(define-key slime-mode-map (kbd "C-M-b") 'backward-char)
(define-key slime-mode-map (kbd "C-f") 'forward-sexp)
(define-key slime-mode-map (kbd "C-M-f") 'forward-char)
The idea is to make navigating by s-expressions the default, which makes sense to me. I can see how once I get used to it, that will be faster. In the same spirit, I wanted to bind C-backspace to backward-kill-sexp. I tried doing:
(define-key slime-mode-map (kbd "C-backspace") 'backward-kill-sexp)
but that didn't work, giving me this error message:
An error has occurred while loading `/Users/divia/.emacs':
error: C- must prefix a single character, not backspace
I figured there must be someway to bind Control-backspace, and Saikat had helpfully just informed me last night that the default Emacs key bindings were stored in /Applications/Aquamacs Emacs/Contents/Resources/lisp/bindings.el.gz, so I decompressed the file and looked inside. Sure enough, I copied the binding style from there, and it worked:
(define-key slime-mode-map [C-backspace] 'backward-kill-sexp)
I don't know enough about elisp to know why one is okay and the other isn't, but for now I'm just happy to have found a solution.
