kakoune.el VS meow

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.

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

Also see Meow[1], [2], which adopts some ideas from god-mode.

[1]: https://github.com/meow-edit/meow

[2]: https://esrh.me/posts/2021-12-18-switching-to-meow.html

You have to go further for ideal IMO.

Evil and evil-collection integrates pretty well, but Meow integrates perfectly and uses the action visible first approach.

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

I think I'd rather hope for meow over Evil. It's close to Evil but embraces more of emacs' default bindings for calling commands.

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

Modal editing with seamless emacs integration avoiding the need for evil-collection type packages.

Repeat action (evil handles this very nicely). see: https://github.com/meow-edit/meow/discussions/414

There's also Meow[1], which I currently use. You have to configure it first to suit your keyboard layout, but there are pre-built configs [2]

[1] https://github.com/meow-edit/meow

I was thinking about this a little more and Meow has something known as keypad mode that basically lets you call key combinations then return to Normal mode. It behaves a lot like god-mode. I just tested it out and if you install Meow you can call keypad-mode from insert and then automatically return to insert mode.

I've only tried out the selection->action model using the meow editing mode for Emacs, and I initially thought it was a really great idea, but I found myself frustrated at the lack of a meaningful repeat operator. I'm not even sure what the semantics of that operator would be in a selection->action model, given that so often the thing I'm repeating in vim is a command like ci".