Removing alt-* menu accelerators in jed

Sometimes software designers make weird default choices.

Jed is a lightweight emacs-like text editor. It is my axe of choice for editing configuration files and other light-weight text editing duties where quick startup is important. Considering that alt-f and alt-b (meta-f and meta-b in emacs parlance) are the default emacs bindings for moving the cursor forward and backwards by one word, it seems weird that jed binds them to CUA style menu accelerators.

This behaviour annoys me to no end since I use those keybindings frequently in regular emacs and bash. Usually I try and ignore it, but today it annoyed me too much. So commenceth the googling for a solution, but with no luck. As luck would have it, it seems I have managed to find the configuration setting at least once before, since my home desktop machine has it configured the way I like.

And so, in the hope of making the setting more discoverable and as a reminder to myself, the solution is to place the following in $HOME/.jedrc

() = evalfile ("emacs");

Happy jedding!