One of my favorite things about NeXTSTEP, ahem, I mean Mac OS X is that you can turn on emacs key bindings everywhere that Cocoa is used. You do it in a file called ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict

Here’s the file that I use:

/* Picked up from Help search on Key Bindings. Good stuff -shane */
/* ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict */
/* from: http://www.gnufoo.org/macosx/index.html#emacs

for a listing of all possible options:
http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macosx/Cocoa/Reference/ApplicationKit/ObjC_classic/Classes/NSResponder.html

and even more info:
http://www.deepsky.com/~misaka/MacOSX/KeyBindings.html
*/
{
“~f”=”moveWordForward:”;
“~b”=”moveWordBackward:”;
“~< "="moveToBeginningOfDocument:";
"~>“=”moveToEndOfDocument:”;
“~v”=”pageUp:”;
“~d”=”deleteWordForward:”;
“~^h”=”deleteWordBackward:”;
“~\010″=”deleteWordBackward:”; /* Alt-backspace */
“~\177″=”deleteWordBackward:”; /* Alt-delete */
“~/”=”complete:”;
}

Yes, I finally set up a blog….