kakoune.el VS boon

Thanks for the tip, meow looks interesting. I never got comfortable in evil-mode, but perhaps meow could be a gateway to trying emacs in anger.

Still waiting for kakoune/helix mode for gnu readline...

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

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

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.

If emacs had a layer for kakoune as comprehensive as evil, I think it would be a no-brainer, but such as it is, kakoune.el is the closest we have which isn't quite was I was hoping for.

Problem is, unlike the evil package linked above, which was last updated 6 days ago, the only package I've found for Kakoune is this one, which was last updated like a year ago.

I set up https://github.com/jmorag/kakoune.el and made some aesthetic changes, i think that EXWM came soon thereafter

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

Shameless plug kakoune.el

Out of curiosity, what is it that makes you want to change from Kakoune? Perhaps something like terminal emacs with kakoune.el could be of interest to you.

I don't fully understand what you want - but about creating cards while you read https://kakoune.org could be interesting (there's a simple elisp clone: https://github.com/jmorag/kakoune.el). That way you can move along words while reading and if you want to turn a phrase into a card you can simply hold shift to continue marking the desired words and then yank them to somewhere.

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 :)