ryo-modal VS meow

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 it's the latter and you're looking for a way to set up vim/evil like keybindings yourself (separate links for each), Modalka, RYO-modal, and Meow (and probably a few dozen others 'cause emacs) allow you to do that.

You can write custom commands that wrap a little bit of logic around the standard movement commands. Or another option would be to look at ryo-modal or meow.

Along with General, you can take a look at some other packages for keybindings and modal editing. A good option is RollYourOwn Modal mode. In the documentation there, it also lists several other packages with pre-defined bindings. Xah-Fly-Keys is specifically designed for ergonomics and may be interesting to explore.

Because you can roll your own modal mode. This particular approach will make the experience convenient in the way you actually prefer (Emacs' extensibility at its finest) and it'll allow you to slowly move towards the modal editing if it happens to be convenient for you.

Similar to Meow is ryo-modal. What I like about ryo-modal is that it is completely unopinionated and does nothing by default, and instead just provides the tools to make your own modal editing system.

I was thinking that combining this functionality with something like ryo-modal could make for a very satisfying and efficient modal keybind system. However, it doesn't seem like there's any ready made way to do this in Emacs.

ryo-modal is a package for creating modal keymaps. I want to test it, but I need a little help.

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.