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Comment by bqmjjx0kac | Hacker News Reader

If you're not aware, check out evil-mode. https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil

And the alternative for people like me, who just want to avoid too much Ctrl pressing sometimes, without fully comitting to the "mode" experience, is god-mode[1].

While you enable it (usually by pressing Esc), Ctrl is "assumed" to be always pressed, so saving a file becomes "x s" (though when I am on Mac, I always map Cmd+S to save - and many other Cmd key based shortcuts that I used in every other app - thanks to emacs built-in shortcuts almost never using the Cmd key as it was designed for Unix).

It made using emacs much more enjoyable for me.

[1] https://github.com/emacsorphanage/god-mode

Also see Meow[1], [2], which adopts some ideas from god-mode.

[1]: https://github.com/meow-edit/meow

[2]: https://esrh.me/posts/2021-12-18-switching-to-meow.html

See also Modalka (<https://github.com/mrkkrp/modalka>), whose author discusses alternatives in the README.

I have tried these, they don't appeal. I want to run an engine based on Keith Bostics take on Bill Joy's editor

Out of curiosity, what behavioral differences stand out to you between nvi and vim? NetBSD ships with nvi and it felt quite alien to me after vim and evil.

I used to believe there was one significant command difference but I am no longer sure it matters and frankly cant recall what it was even. There is a difference in how they handle the undo/redo stack, there are some differences in :.= and ^g handling. The flip to alternate brace pair behaviour is different but can be configured in vim. I think expandtabs processing is different. Nvi is far smaller but that obsessional view is less important in these days.

Nvi has no syntax highlighting and is far less scriptable. Again, it's minimalist religion.

A lot of this is muscle memory.

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