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Comment by msla | Hacker News Reader

I absolutely love the default Emacs keystrokes.

Me too! I've always been baffled by the hate. If you come from vim, just use evil, install Doom Emacs or whatever. End of the day it's all just arbitrary muscle memory so once you get used to it all other keybindings (bar perhap vim) seems absurd.

Evil-mode is incredible, for me Emacs with evil is the best vi-derived editor in the world, beating neovim and vim by miles. But as an ex-Vim user and fairly recent Emacs convert I feel like a guest in a clubhouse full of old timers. It wouldn't be right for me to swagger around their domain, demanding they change things up to accommodate me. Evil mode is already a much warmer welcome than I'm entitled to, so what if it takes a line or two to configure? I'm very grateful to have what I have now, I don't need or want Emacs defaults changed.

I do too.

I'm one of those weirdos that disable transient-mark-mode because I don't feel like it does the right thing for all situations where you use mark. Sometimes I want to use mark like a cheap bookmark and C-x C-x between mark and point, sometimes I use the rectangle commands and for those transient-mark-mode only makes things worse.

(I know the CUA mode has some fancy rectangle features, but that's not for me)

I wrote about marking and exchanging point and mark without activating TMM:

https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/fixing-mark-commands-...

Also, the CUA rectangle stuff's actually mainlined and can be used without CUA (`C-x SPC')

I didn't know about C-x SPC, thanks for the tip!

I enjoyed your article but I think the solution for me is to leave TMM disabled, though it makes me curious about what else I've missed in the last decade(s). You just made a sale of your book.

Thanks :) Enjoy! Shoot me an email when you've read it. I'd love to hear about what you've learned.

Same. They're generally very good, and there's a lot of logic and fluidity to how movement and editing combine.

Me too :) One of the reasons why I fell in love with macOS - every text editing widget in the whole OS is very consistently using the basic Emacs keys like C-a, C-e, C-k, C-y, C-t, etc. That also makes Xcode (and most other IDEs) much less awful right out of the box ;)

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