Hacker News Reader

Comment by plam | Hacker News Reader

my whole office use emacs for clojure dev but I use vim. I tried emacs for a few days on more than one occasions but simply couldn't bear the physical awkwardness of the key combos (I did remap ctrl to caps).

View on HN

I'm glad someone mentioned this. I used emacs for years and was totally ignorant of vi/vim, but I started getting pain in my hand from all the key-combos. I was skeptical of modes, but it turns out to be pretty natural, and I actually like the concept of editing as a sequence of transactions with a start and end, rather than one continuous stream. I've never gone overboard with customizing either editor, so for me it was primarily ergonomics.

Try Evil Mode with Emacs for Clojure. Its pretty close to vim

I use emacs but I also dislike the "you can rebind any keys you want, as long as the sequence begins with C-c". As it turns out emacs doesn't user the super key at all (Apple key on Mac keyboards, Windows key [I think?] on Other). You can dramatically increase the number of comfortable chords available to you by taking advantage of this, e.g.: (global-set-key (kbd "s-l") 'forward-word)

Not using a Super key is actually a great feature. My Super key is used solely in the AwesomeWM (a window manager) commands, so the two (awesome and emacs) never clash on who will handle a key combination.

I was very unpleasantly surprised when I discovered that OS X uses a single Control key for some of its hotkeys (like C-up/down) which I bind in Emacs for my own purposes.

While the OS-specific keys are sometimes called super, they are not "super" in emacs terminology. Also, if you skim M-x describe-bindings you will find quite a few bindings beginning with s-.

EDIT: If you really want access to a less crowded namespace, using (global-set-key "\C-z" nil) to free up the c-z prefix and binding Hyper are popular.

If you are feeling a little confined, key chord[1] will allow you to get creative with your bindings.

[1] http://www.emacswiki.org/KeyChord

I've never paid attention to the C-c convention and liberally bound commands to whatever key I preferred.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com