symex.el VS meow

I also recommend symex[1]. Although it is more “locked-in” to s-expressions than other solutions (which takes some getting used to at first), I find that for me this is exactly what makes movement feel much more intuitive and editing much more precise.

The one thing I don’t like is that symex depends on so many other plugins (especially Evil, which I am trying to swap out with the more lightweight meow), but this will apparently change soon. They are also working towards support for non-Lisp languages via tree-sitter, but I don’t know how well it works.

[1]: https://github.com/drym-org/symex.el

The pilot projects (including Symex.el) are accepting financial contributions and will distribute them to sources of value including contributors and antecedent projects in a process that we all have a say in.

This is a really useful synopsis. symex has recently had TS support merged in, and apparently includes navigation and structural editing similar to its lisp-like language capabilities. I think it's still early going and I haven't tested, but may be worth a look.

Has anyone used symex.el without evil? I just learned it can be use with vanilla emacs (despite the 2nd word in its tagline). I also learned they have a tree-sitter branch which will expand its powers to many languages.

I started out using evil, but now I mostly use Symex. (Structural editing. non-lisps support wip for those sad moments you can't use lisp). For now depends on evil, but could be separated.

The purpose of this congress is to engage in the process of Dialectical Inheritance Attribution, which is a collective process by which we apply agreed-upon standards to the task of appraising and attributing the value of work done in the world. At this initial congress, there are two open source projects on the agenda to be appraised: Symex.el which is an Emacs extension, and Qi, which is a functional DSL on the Racket platform.

symex has a branch that’s been working on integrating with tree-sitter.

If you want to go nuts with structural editing you may also want to check out symex mode: https://github.com/drym-org/symex.el

It uses paredit (among others) for its low level functionality, but the vim-style modal interface allows you to manipulate the tree structure with single keystrokes in a precise and very expressive way. Keep in mind that you have to actively learn how to use it and it will feel awkward at first (similar to how vim feels for beginners), but I find the editing experience very pleasent and smooth after I got used to it.

Another thing I really like about it is that you can still switch to normal mode and it doesn’t get in your way like other plugins where I had to change my keybindings all the time because the amount of convenient shortcuts is still quite limited in the end. This modal switching to different editing contexts (or languages?) is something I feel should be explored much further.

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".