expand-region.el VS xah-fly-keys

I don't use Meow, so this may be wildly off the mark (no pun) here. But I use and really like expand-region for selection and marking. With modal editing, I imagine it would be extremely fast and intuitive.

I think the following packages would fit your wishlist, as it is very similar to mine. As mentioned in the replies, there is (https://github.com/magnars/expand-region.el) and (https://github.com/mickeynp/combobulate). I regularly use (https://github.com/Fuco1/smartparens).

Paredit, Speed-of-thought lisp, Helm, perhaps Lispy but I am not using it myself. I found expand-region to work really well when writing and modifying elisp. lisp-extra-font-lock if you want some more blink (and font-lock-studio). Helpful is very good to have instead of built-in help, it displays the source code by default as well as symbol properties. It is a very informative learning experience to see how built-in stuff is implemented. I am quite lazy to press extra in built-in help to see the source code, but with Helpful, you get it auto in the same window, whicih is great for learning. Seeing symbol properties is sometimes a time saver so you don't have to M-: and type an Elisp function to see the symbol properties when debugging. Learn Edebug, it is very useful built-in application for Emacs Lisp development.

Exactly. Consider you have point in a table definition. You can programmatically find which org element you are in, at least for org-mode. Or in a defun for elisp-mode, a sentence or paragraf in plain text and so on. You could just press a shortcut, and based on major-mode you could find boundaries of the element and put it in hidden-list. It would be really fast to work that way. I don't know if it already exists in some package. Or you could go for somewhat easier version, and just check if a region is active, and if it is, hide region, and if not, hide current line, or based on mode, hide element at point. That way we can easily expand/contract region with er/expand-region and press a key to temporary hide/unhide it. It is not difficult to write a function to do that based on text properties. Thing-at-point might be useful here too.

https://github.com/magnars/expand-region.el is your friend. I use the built-in equivalent of it in IntelliJ all the time. it's a bit like a vi text objects in the simplest possible way.

Thanks, I will give paredit a shot.

I'm a regular emacs user, but I normally use expand-region[1] and cut/paste to edit lisp code. Expand-region usually knows what I want to move around after just one or two calls, only requires one key binding, and has visual feedback. And it works great in every language I have used.

https://github.com/magnars/expand-region.el

One thing that I always missed is the ability to select a whole function in C#, but I thought I just didn't know the right package or it was something trivial to do ad-hoc. Surprisingly, up to these days I still couldn't find anything. I bumped into the expand-region package at some point, which is awesome, but still something was missing. After going through the Emacs Lisp Intro tutorial, I learned a bit how to search things in a buffer, and I was also editing csharp files every day, so I decided to try to implement the functions myself. Fast forward some weeks, here I am, with a smile on my face :)

The package for growing the selection is the excellent expand-region by Magnar Sveen

If you want to try out some third-party packages in the beginning, I think the most "bang-for-your-buck" you'll get is with Avy. Also, expand-region. And specifically for writing: olivetti-mode, flyspell, dictionary, and Nicolas Rougier's Nano and Elegant Emacs setups.

You will probably like expand-region.el. It is fantastic for selecting inside brackets, quotes, etc.

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