Like many of us, James Dyer sometimes has to use Vim even though he’s a dedicated Emacs user. He does this often enough that he’d like to maintain a bit of muscle memory for the Vim navigation commands. He doesn’t want a full blown Vim emulation like Evil or even something like Meow so he rolled his own. His solution is (really) simple: he merely made a few remappings:
- Ctrl+b → Meta+h
- Ctrl+f → Meta+l
- Ctrl+n → Meta+j
- Ctrl+p → Meta+k
It would, of course, be easy to expand this. You do need to find other bindings for the ones yours stealing but at least in this case Dyer says he didn’t use them much anyway.
I know I’m always going on about muscle memory and the problems I have with trying to use two editors but even I have to use Vim sometimes and when I do I may struggle to remember the bindings but it’s mostly pretty easy. What I don’t want to do is rearrange all my Emacs bindings just to ease my occasional forays into Vim land. Of course, my travels over the wall are infrequent so perhaps I’d feel differently if I had to make the trip more often.
In any event, Dyer’s solution may point the way to a solution for those of you have similar problems. Take a look at his post if you, too, occasionally live in two worlds.