{"id":7344,"date":"2018-07-16T12:23:20","date_gmt":"2018-07-16T16:23:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=7344"},"modified":"2018-07-16T12:23:20","modified_gmt":"2018-07-16T16:23:20","slug":"emacs-as-an-editor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=7344","title":{"rendered":"Emacs As an Editor"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> Over at the Emacs reddit, honeywhite <a href=\"https:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/emacs\/comments\/8y5tfv\/who_here_actually_likes_emacstheeditor_as_opposed\/\">wonders why anyone would use the Emacs default key bindings<\/a>. He&rsquo;s an Emacs user but can&rsquo;t understand why anyone would prefer the standard Emacs key bindings to one of the Vi emulation modes. <\/p>\n<p> As most of you know, I was a Vi user for more than a couple of decades and then moved to Emacs. When I did, I went all in and learned the Emacs key bindings. It was a bit hard rearranging my muscle memory but now I&rsquo;m perfectly happy with the Emacs bindings. <\/p>\n<p> Honeywhite&rsquo;s real objection to the standard Emacs editor is that commands generally require a key chord but that&rsquo;s because Emacs, unlike Vi(m), isn&rsquo;t modal. If your editor isn&rsquo;t modal, you&rsquo;re pretty much stuck with key chording (or menus\/arrow keys). Oddly, honeywhite doesn&rsquo;t mention the <i>real<\/i> advantage of Vi key bindings: they&rsquo;re <a href=\"http:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=2750\">composable<\/a>. Once you&rsquo;ve learned the movement keys and that <kbd>d<\/kbd> is for &ldquo;delete,&rdquo; you automatically know how to delete just about everything. That&rsquo;s a very powerful abstraction that Emacs lacks. <\/p>\n<p> Fortunately, Emacs has both camps covered. If you hate key chording, you can use one of the Vi emulation modes. If you can&rsquo;t put up with modality, you can use the standard bindings. I like both systems but decided to learn the Emacs way when I switched. That&rsquo;s just me; you can switch and (mostly) bring Vim with you if you prefer. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Over at the Emacs reddit, honeywhite wonders why anyone would use the Emacs default key bindings. He&rsquo;s an Emacs user but can&rsquo;t understand why anyone would prefer the standard Emacs key bindings to one of the Vi emulation modes. As &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=7344\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[18],"class_list":["post-7344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-emacs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7344"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7344\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7345,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7344\/revisions\/7345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}