kanata VS meow

Gotta give a shoutout to kanata[1] which I have used daily for years at this point after giving up on QMK-powered keyboards.

QMK itself is great, but I was never able to find a non-columnar split ISO keyboard to use it with. Eventually I reluctantly settled on the Logitech K860[2] and I'm now happily using my favourite features from QMK with kanata at the software level.

[1]: https://github.com/jtroo/kanata

[2]: If I'm behind the times and there is now a QMK-compatible keyboard that looks like this, please let me know!

This is not in Emacs, but if I can't modify my keyboard's firmware (e.g on a laptop), I use Kanata https://github.com/jtroo/kanata. It works by creating a virtual keyboard in Linux (and uses a filter driver or process hooks in Windows), so it can work in any program as they just see a normal keyboard.

Besides the better caps word (by the way, you can have it in software in Win/Linux apps like https://github.com/jtroo/kanata/blob/main/docs/config.adoc#c...) you can also toggle capslock with e.g. a double tap while having on-hold functionality to the more useful Control, so you still wouldn't need to hold any modifier key

jtroo/kanata: Improve keyboard comfort and usability with advanced customization (github.com)

One particular approach that one might find it interesting is how the configuration is laid out (using S-expression from Lisps).

[0] https://github.com/jtroo/kanata/blob/main/docs/config.adoc

Kanata[0] is amazing. It support both Linux and Windows. But I'm yet to try it on windows because my majority work is on linux.

[0] https://github.com/jtroo/kanata

Using meow:https://github.com/meow-edit/meow I actually got keybindings in Emacs that are helix-like, so I use helix for certain projects and Emacs for others.

The muscle memory transfers well.

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.