komokana VS helix-vim

kanata[1] and komokana[2].

kanata is basically like QMK for any keyboard without the firmware requirement. I use kanata with my trusty old iMac keyboard which is to this day my favourite keyboard of all time. But now I have all the cool QMK-style layers with it.

So that is awesome on its own, but where it gets even better for me, and this is where the seconds have really added up to hours, is that I wrote another piece of software which programmatically changes layers on kanata whenever a different window is focused in my tiling window manager.

This has honestly changed -everything- for me. I no longer have to waste keys on my keyboard to switch layers, I no longer have to -think- about switching layers, I just focus another window with alt+hjkl and whatever keyboard layer I expect for any given application is automatically applied. Definitely one of those "you can never go back" experiences for me.

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

[2]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komokana

I have an Ergodox EZ sitting collecting dust these days. I got a great deal of use out of it and before long I was compiling my own firmware and making use of various advanced QMK features that were not available through the online visual layer configuration tool.

The keyboard has great build quality, the customer service is great (I got a free replacement for the right half after an issue with one of the keys), the ortholinear layout isn't that difficult to get used to, but ultimately the issue for me was that my hands aren't big enough to use the keyboard comfortably or to type as accurately as I'd like / as I'm used to typing.

I'm now back on my Apple Magic Keyboard and happier than ever, though with a few tweaks and improvements taken from my time using the Ergodox EZ.

I am now using kanata[1] which allows me to have multiple QMK-style layers on my regular old keyboard. This is already a huge step up from my pre-Ergodox days! I also like that I can have my layer configurations version controlled in a plain old git/dotfiles repo.

Since the layers are handled at the software level, I wrote my own integration with kanata, called komokana[2] to switch keyboard layers programmatically based on different state events emitted from my tiling window manager[3].

What that means in practice is that my keyboard can automatically switch to an app-specific layer when that app's window is focused, or to a workspace specific layer, or to a browser tab-specific layer, or really just switch on any event emitted by the window manager or any specific window manager state.

For me, this is really the killer feature of my setup now, and one that I don't think would be anywhere near as easy to implement with QMK which sits at the hardware level.

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

[2]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komokana

[3]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi

Hello friends! You may know me from my previous posts about my tiling window manager and my automatic keyboard layer switcher (or maybe even my harebrained attempts to get Helix to behave more like Vim!)

With all of these pieces now in place, I am very happy to introduce komokana. an automatic application-aware keyboard layer switcher for Windows.

I tried to re-learn from Vim to Helix but failed. No sure if this is a muscle memory problem or perhaps article is right about cons Kakoune-like approach for me. Even adapting with something https://github.com/LGUG2Z/helix-vim did not work. So if you like Helix it probably a good thing that you did not learn the vim at the time.

Not that they're inherently worse, just different - I'm perfectly happy with vim motions and relearning to type is pretty low on my list of priorities. Luckily there is a compatibility hack, not perfect but it's close enough: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/helix-vim

I want to like Helix, I really, really want to. It's lean, fast, polished, purely console based so it fits my workflows perfectly... but the almost-like-vim-but-not-really key bindings are a deal breaker. I just can't make the switch.

If Helix were completely different in this regard, like Emacs is, I could handle--and I know because I use both vim and Emacs regularly pretty fluently. But Helix is way too close to the vim keybindings to discern it from a memory muscle perspective. I use vim keybindings everywhere else (zsh, all readline-based apps via a setting in ~/.inputrc, VSCode), so getting used to slight differences in just one editor is extremely hard because I can't just drop all other apps.

I recently tried this: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/helix-vim which attempts to provide vim mappings to Helix. It's funny how the description in the page describes my progression almost 100%. And while it makes things slightly better, it's still not accurate enough to make this a non-issue.

https://github.com/LGUG2Z/helix-vim somebody on the internet has you covered

There is this configuration: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/helix-vim

This switches most keybinds to be vi-like.