Comment by TacticalCoder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TacticalCoder | Hacker News Reader

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I do totally agree the key-bindings are neither ergonomic (they're actually inducing RSI issues) nor do they make any sense in any way, which is your first point.

However this is trivially fixed because in Emacs everything is configurable. Keymappings are very easy to change (I'm using my own, completely custom ones, in my own keymapping minor-mode). There's also the "evil mode" reproducing the very superior (compared to Emacs) vim keybindings. So it's not true that they cannot be fixed. Not only can keybindings be fixed but a) they should and b) it's trivial to do so.

I'm using my own minor-mode which contains all my keymappings. Doing it that way you'll hardly ever have conflicting shortcuts.

evil-mode is an option too for people who want the (way better) vi(m) keybindings.

Once you change keybindings, all documentation you find online doesn't apply anymore. Emacs has a large and active community, which I consider one of its main advantages that I don't want to lose.

That being said, Emacs has already forced me to re-learn basic things like copy/paste and search/replace. I don't want to question my workflow on such a low level in 2014, when there is much higher-level IDE stuff to learn (code completion engines, refactoring, "jump to definition"). Alas, such features are not language-agnostic, they are tricky to set up and not standardized.

I find discussions about keybindings quite derailing from the higher-level discussions we should be having instead.

You can always use god-mode if you don't like holding C so much. Then you can just hold p or n to move the line.

https://github.com/chrisdone/god-mode

I am using evil-mode since i switch from Vim to Emacs and i am obsessed. Don't get me wrong , VIM is well VIM (awesome!), but some emacs plugins are more polished that VIM's ones and i can't stand vimscript.

But you like sucky elisp?

IMHO is better than sucky vimscript.

Which ones? I had the exact opposite reaction to trying to use evil. I liked it, I like lisp, but the plugins where so crufty and sensitive. I got most of what I wanted working, but never got good tags support working, never got good generalized fuzzy finding working (tags, buffers, files), and never got used to the "culture shock" when I dropped out of evil mode in another buffer.

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