Editing Code in Emacs

I was excited for avy until I realized its purpose is only to move the cursor to a place visible on the screen. It does nothing a mouse can't do with one click.

(This is my understanding at least; I'm open to correction.)

I'm a lover of Vim bindings, and so I appreciate keyboard controls, but where Vim enables working with files and text in a general and powerful way, avy enables avoiding one click with the mouse. I don't use Vim to avoid the mouse, I use it so I can hack some Vim macros together when I'm editing text on a text-level. Vim (or Emacs) is an eternal tool that can do big things, avy just positions my cursor.

I have it installed and have the main commands bound to convenient keys. But I’m so used to moving via words, paragraphs and isearch that the only time I remember it is when targeting symbols.

I don't think this was the first package to use the tree idea, but `avy-goto-char-timer` is amazing and is new since the first time I tried it. After activating goto with a key press you type as many characters as you like to get where you want. Often you can get straight there if it's something unique, but if not then it goes to the tree. It's amazing how quick you get at typing "def" or something to get to a Python function definition, for example.

What I love about functionality like this is it's completely generic. It's just text. I don't need any lsp support to get me "go to def" or something. I can open a file in a language I've never seen before and use the exact same interface I'm used to to navigate around.

> I'm not a fan of modal interfaces

I'm assuming you're using Emacs (otherwise why would you be commenting in this thread, right?). It's weird to hear that from an Emacs user - it's inherently a modal editor - keycords are modal, isearch is modal, repeat-mode is modal, transients are all modals with states. Evil-mode only adds some consistent "language" and structure to deal with modality, there's nothing much to it.

Idea of vim-navigation is actually pretty neat thing - absolutely beautiful, practical model. Its biggest problem is that it encapsulates some tacit knowledge - nobody can really explain the benefits of it to anyone until they try it for some time and it "clicks". I suppose just how learning to ride a bike may work differently for different people - it also takes different amount of time and effort. But once you figure it out - there's really no going back - no reason. It's very rare to meet people who've mastered it and then willingly stopped using it.

There's no conceptual difference in switching between navigation and insert modes in Vim and e.g. C-c C-c/C-d in Emacs - the only difference that you're in-between state more often, but once muscle memory trained, it becomes second nature - you don't even think about what mode you're actually in - it becomes very fluid and consistent flow state that allows you to very efficiently navigate and deal with text - with any kind of text - plain and structured.

Also, I find that mastering efficiency in Emacs using only vanilla keybindings is a bit harder than becoming a keyboard-maestro with the help of evil-mode or similar modal modes like meow. I've been working over a decade in various teams where people use Emacs, and evil-mode users typically figure out things much faster, while those sticking to native keybindings, don't even discover some great features of Emacs for years.

> But for the remaining 2%, it's provably true that mouse is better

This is definitely true. The thing is that using the mouse is a habit, and until you break it, people find themselves instinctively using it in situations where it would be better to use the keyboard. So the 'hard' mouse disable is more of a 'going cold-turkey' type thing to try and break the habit. I agree that once it's broken it makes sense to relax this.

How using a mouse and incurring a context switch is better than just mashing j/k a couple of times in worst case scenario?

If your workflow feels comfortable there's really no need to change it in my opinion. The reason I do this is to avoid the frustrating feeling that I'm spending all my time moving around in the text file rather than actually making the program. It's less about speed and more about feeling good while programming.

You really only need a few shortcuts to feel comfortable. The ones in the basic tutorial are pretty much all I use, but I also enable god-mode to avoid having to keep Ctrl pressed as that hurts.

Just type C-h t (help-with-tutorial) and work your way through it.

Disagree with this just because it makes everything else easier. The more you stick to common key bindings, the more intuitive various packages will be. Eg navigating lines vs blocks in a magit diff block is C-n and N respectively. Copying a full hash is M-w. All these bindings are intuitive “overlays” on conventional bindings.

Emacs shines when packages combine to form a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Changing basic key bindings is the quickest way to vitiate that symbiosis.

Unfortunately.

And while they may be old school, traditional, and orthodox, they are by no means idiosyncratic. They’re widely supported: readline , bash, everywhere on macos, even modern browsers. Eg you can actually paste in bash: try killing something with C-w or C-k, and paste it back using C-y. Or transpose arguments using C-M-t. Navigate suggestions in Firefox using C-n and C-p. Bash even supports undo using C-/.

All to say: learning emacs movement keys pays off.

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