.emacs.d VS xah-fly-keys

In my Helm, I have to actively choose the candidate to confirm it. So I can type in both paths that are shorter or longer then existing ones. I even made a video to demonstrate it, the thread was relatively recently up I think. My Helm setup is here it if helps you, find Helm in the list of packages.

I also use Helm, and I have no problems. Just keep typing, once you typed a letter that does not exist in a path name it will stop completing. I don't know if I have some special option enabled/disabled; I don't think you need it, but you can see my Helm config (just scroll down untill you find "Helm").

When all deps are installed,my config is over 200 packages. On my Arch Linux desktop I built in 2016, with i7 4.6k (haswell) it starts ~0.7 secs, but init time will be anything between 0.5 ~ 0.8 secs, i guess depending on what system does. So all things same, init time will vary.

I am using it in my literate org-config. If you scroll down, there is a big list of packages, and I have done a small wrapper around helm-imenu, to jump to a package configuration. Looks like this.

That does not work for completions, at least not for me. It works for keymaps, so you can have mode specific (or really any) keymap in src blocks. I have been using his method myself in my init file generator for quite a while now. If you (or anyone) knows/have an idea how to expand it for completions and eldoc, I would be really happy to hear.

I don't know what if it is more robust but I use more or less plain dired with just some options turned on to make it less noisy to look at, but I don't "manage" my files so much to be honest. I do use some extras from dired-hacks, and my own dired-auto-readme, but that is about it. You can check my setup if you wish, look at "dired" under packages and in Lisp folder for "dired-extras.el".

I personally put all custom lisp in a special directory and scrape autoloads myself. If you are curious, you can check under "generator", functions generate-autoloads and collect-autoloads, but there is nothing special, just plain text search and copy-paste programmatically. I don't recommend to use it though.

lol no xah-fly-keys

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.

Another consideration is that some editors make heavy use of key chords, which aren't so ergo friendly. Emacs in particular is notorious with how it uses the Ctrl key. I highly recommend switching to an editor with modal keybindings like NeoVim, or alternatively, your existing editor may have a Vim keybindings mode or extension. For instance Emacs has Evil mode and xah-fly-keys. Another route to circumventing chords is you can use one-shot modifiers (aka sticky modifiers) or define macros.

More radically, you might find a modal interface easier and more comfortable to use with HRMs, like Vim's, or staying within Emacs, using Evil mode or Xah fly keys.

I use xah-fly-keys. In command mode, on a QWERTY keyboard, the comma key moves the cursor to the next window.

> Long love ergomacs!

I recently stumbled over, and started using (and modifying) Xah's "xah-fly-keys" emacs bindings, which are a somewhat more radical implementation of the ideas behind ergoemacs (e.g. use Emacs without any "chording", i.e. without ever having to press two keys at once apart from shift+letter).

[1] https://github.com/xahlee/xah-fly-keys

*xah-fly-keys

I made it myself, but it was largely inspired by "xah fly keys": https://github.com/xahlee/xah-fly-keys