boon VS objed

I've never yet used kakoune itself, but I've just started using the Meow modal editing package for Emacs, which I'm told resembles kakoune to some similar extent as boon resembles vi.

Shouldn't make much difference, because most of Emacs's default keybinds are either mnemonic or arbitrary (not relative, like Vi's hjkl). There are some unique control interfaces for Emacs which support (and even recommend) alt layouts out of the box. Specifically Meow, Fingers and Boon.

There's also Boon which I like quite a lot but I opted against using mostly because of all the places I would need to type where I wouldn't have access to Boon unless I ported it (a plan I assure you but one lumped behind 1,000 other projects TODO).

https://github.com/jyp/boon

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.

Vim never, ever appealed to me. The keys are not exactly ergonomic, like the WordStar diamond, or intuitive, like the Emacs keys. But I can understand how modal editing - like in WordStar - can improve the writing experience tremendously. So, for my custom Emacs configuration for creative writing, I am using Boon, which allows me to use the left hand home row to navigate characters/words/sentences/lines, and the right hand home row to delete/insert/etc. Pressing v switches to Insert Mode, and C-; switches back to Command Mode. Highly addictively efficient!

I've used both vim and evil in the past, but lately I've been playing with boon and I'm quite enjoying it. It plays nicely with emacs and has some good ideas, like pressing the yank key twice in a row will fix spaces:

I am using Boon, and it has transformed my Emacs experience!

I use https://github.com/jyp/boon which has changed my life.

I am not using Evil in 2022 because I am using Boon :)

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).