🚀 go-pugleaf

I have been using gnu emacs for several years now and I find some
aspects of the user interface to be annoyingly inconsistent.  It's
like this:

Emacs sometimes asks you to choose one item from a one-entry-per-line
table by moving the cursor onto the corresponding line and pressing a
specified key.  Typically these are situations where alpha-numeric
keys don't insert themselves but have a special meaning.  Examples
which occur to me frequently are:

  (1) dired mode:
      When you are in dired mode, your buffer shows the listing of a
      directory.  You can choose one entry (either a file or a
      subdirectory) by pressing "f" to visit the file or to do dired
      on the subdirectory.

  (2) menus in info mode:
      When a document is read using info mode, it is divided into
      nodes which are typically structured as a tree.  Nodes can
      contain menus which are tabular lists of subnodes.  To select
      (and then read) such a subnode you have to press RETURN on a
      menu entry.

  (3) mh mail mode:
      When you use the mh mail mode package to read your mail (the
      elisp command is mh-rmail), it shows a tabular listing of all
      your mails in one buffer.  To select (and read) one of these
      messages you have to press "." on the message entry.

  (4) emacs finder mode:
      When you invoke emacs finder mode (using the command
      finder-by-keyword) you are presented a list of keywords.  To
      obtain further information on one keyword you have to select it
      with SPACE.

All these mechanisms seem so similar to me that I occasionally
confuse keys, i.e. I erroneously press "f" in MH-Folder mode to read a
mail and then am confronted with the question whom I want to
forward my message to (because mh-forward is the command actually bound
to the key "f").

To summarize it with a table.  The "select-item" key is

	mode		| key
	----------------+-------
	dired		| f
	info		| RETURN
	mh-mail		| .
	finder		| SPACE

So my question is: Shouldn't there be a convention about how the user can
choose an item from a list in such situations?  Or maybe an
user-definable "select-item-from-table-when-letters-do-not-insert-themselves"
key should be used?


Jochen.