ace-window VS objed

Thanks that is helpful. I do have a question though. Is there any plugin similar to ace-window? I frequently have a situation where I have two frames (basically two windows) that are connected to the same Emacs process, and I am jumping between buffers in both frames.

Looks good. But https://github.com/abo-abo/ace-window was a game-changer for me :-)

take a look at https://github.com/abo-abo/ace-window

I recently started using workspaces in my workflow, and although I know many packages are available in Emacs such as the ones mentioned in the comments, but what worked for me so far is just make a second frame and use ace-window with the variable aw-scope set to 'frame. And from there I just move one frame to the appropriate workspace in my desktop environment and that's it. It's worth keeping in mind that the buffers are still shared so might not be the perfect workspace experience, but I don't think that matters in Emacs.

Try the ace-window package. I think you're referring to C-x o which is bound to other-window.

Also highly recommend ace-window.

I'd like to use ffap (to open files/dirs) in windows I select with ace-window (https://github.com/abo-abo/ace-window). Similar to what aw-switch-buffer-in-window and aw-switch-buffer-other-window do, but with find-file-at-point instead of buffer selection. Crucially, the point means the where I am when the function is called.

If someone has a big monitor I recommend changing C-x 1 delete-other-windowsto revert to have 2 windows open, (like in this config) and using ace-window to navigate to your many windows.

Ace-Window is meant to replace `other-window' by assigning each window a short, unique label

To build on what others are saying about Emacs, if you start exploring the package ecosystem, you're going to see quite a lot of really interesting packages that are related to improving/experimenting with the UX of editing text. While I'm not endorsing anyone in particular, I think what this list does show is just how easy it is to do pretty much whatever you want in Emacs;

https://karthinks.com/software/avy-can-do-anything/

https://github.com/jyp/boon

https://github.com/clemera/objed

https://github.com/jmorag/kakoune.el

https://github.com/meow-edit/meow/

https://github.com/xahlee/xah-fly-keys

https://github.com/Kungsgeten/ryo-modal

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

Emacs 29 also now has treesitter and LSP mode integration built-in, a compilation mode, a comint mode for REPLs, excellent file browsing packages (I use dired/dirvish), and a few other killer features.

Now, if what you truly dislike are "quirky editors", prepare yourself for a world of hurt because vanilla Emacs departs quite a bit from "modern" text editors. I struggled with this for a while, but eventually by buying into the paradigm, I now feel that when emacs try emulating "modern" IDE features like autocompletion, LSP, and DAP UI, I feel like it's a regression, not a progression. The point here is that you might have an "idea" of what good initial UX and lack of quirks would look like, but Emacs might change the way you think.

This looks like an interesting and valiant attempt to build something that improves on everything that came before it, but I did find the documentation lacking in clarity.

I'm experimenting with this package right now instead:

https://github.com/clemera/objed

and will wire up the keyboard shortcuts using RYO package to roll my own modal state.

3.objed:: https://github.com/clemera/objed.git

Wow. meow project looks similar to objed but with more features. These projects are inclined to modal editing but not being vim. Thank you for suggesting.

I like the semi-modal editing package objed (short for textual object editor)

This reminds me of u/clemera's objed and of versor.

There are other modal systems for emacs. You even can construct your own with https://github.com/mrkkrp/modalka and https://github.com/Kungsgeten/ryo-modal. I have done that, these packages were extremely easy to use. I had a lot of fun designing the modal regime of my dreams. There are https://github.com/LouisKottmann/emacs-baboon, https://github.com/xahlee/xah-fly-keys (and its various forks) and https://github.com/clemera/objed.

I forgot about objed! Which is another very interesting project.

I didn't fully get what your interactive piping solution is, but I found that objed has a command oddly unrelated to the rest of its codebase: objed-ipipe, which does what I imagined Howard's piper to do but more intuitively to me. Though it seems you can write piper commands out in lisp so it's probably a superset feature-wise, I just never got started learning it.

Well laid out, I fully agree. I think there is still a lot of potential to combine these two approaches in a better way, Emacs knows about many structures already but I think it could be more convenient to act on those. I tried my hand on this with objed which aims to make it easier to act/navigate on certain units (on demand or semi automatically).