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Comment by drewm1980 | Hacker News Reader

drewm1980

well intentioned nit-pick: vim commands starting with a g are NOT chords, and that's very important from am usability standpoint. For the most part vim avoids chords, while E-macs embraces them. It's a question of whether you want to strain your hands (chords/emacs) or your brain (modal/vim) for triggering infrequent commands.

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I would like to see an option for both in a text-editor - they are not as far apart as people assume. In emacs there are not enough chorded options for everything so after a while they switched to dead-key like operations. That is basically a modal interface where you have to keep the mode key depressed.

My dream editor would feature: * Three modes: insert, quick commands, a searchable palette for everything. * Configurable switch between modal/non-modal use of the command key. * On screen display for quick command mode (e.g. a partially translucent display of the keyboard when command mode is entered with icons to show what each key does).

The memorability issue for key-strokes doesn't really exist in a modern desktop environment. It is a relic of terminals with low bandwidth and poor support for multiplexing information. In a windowed / eye-candied environment the memorability of shortcuts should be a non-issue and discoverability of the command-set should be improved.

At this point I have to accept that I've said way too much in response to your nitpick and I will stop typing now :)

> * Configurable switch between modal/non-modal use of the command key.

This one is also provided in Spacemacs which is called editing style (vim, emacs or hybrid). It is possible to switch between them dynamically.

I like to think of Vim's way of doing things as arpeggios, where Emacs uses chords.

the last sentence is a good point! I am not very precise typer, and I use vim.

I work on different keyboards, actually 3 different layouts: external keyboard home and at work, home laptop, and work laptop (different one).

I think it would be difficult to do the emacs chords on different layouts. For basic vim usage I just need to adapt to 2 special keys - colon and slash (+ right shift). That takes just few minutes.

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