Excuse me while I get really mad at you for not using Vim even though it doesn’t effect me in anyway.

Jokes aside, I’ve gone the route of just using an extension in VS code to give me the Vim key bindings. I can’t go back to non-modal text editors the muscle memory is too strong. I really should play around with emacs in “evil mode” at some point. Maybe I could get the best of both worlds then.

Edit: Vince -> Vim, Vince is a terrible text editor he doesn’t even understand my keystrokes when I type at him.

People who know what emacs is is the same demographic as people who love talking about what software they use

(especially ctrl-k for killing from your cursor position to the end of the line ctrl-a for jumping to the beginning of a line and ctrl-e for jumping to the end of a line)

I haven’t tried emacs but in any other text editor for these things I’d do:

• shift+end, del
• home
• end

do you have any more complex examples where emacs excels?

I had a college professor that I worked for who was basically the Emacs Enthusiast. So I gave it a try, learned about a half dozen commands and never really moved past that. Later, I was told to give vi a try, so I did and had basically the same experience. Built-in discoverability is/was non-existent for them and I never had a real need to pick up any more or spend hours reading man pages to figure them out. Time past, I went through a few different phases of GUI text editors/IDEs but could always pull out just enough vi or emacs commands when I needed. I did see my colleagues and friends who were all in on vim/emacs with 1000 line configs and thought they looked pretty cool, but I just didn’t have the time or inclination when I could be doing other things.

Then in the last year I needed to go all in on a text mode editor for a variety of reasons. I looked around, gave Helix a try, and loved it from the beginning. My few vi commands worked, there is actual discoverability built in, and the select->action grammar makes way more sense to me than the others I’ve tried.

Helix is not as extremely customizable or configurable as vi or emacs (yet, plugin system coming soon™ ) but it has a good default out-of-the-box configuration, enough configuration options for what I want, good lsp support, and discoverability.

I used to live in emacs, back when emacs stood-for “Eight Megs ( RAM ) & Continuous Swapping”.

( the 386-486 days )

Morass-of-capability.

Then, after being fought-off by Vim a couple times, I read, in “The DESIGN of Everyday Things”, that humankind has a mental-defect which causes us to NOT change-levels, when we NEED to have changed-levels.

People who speak louder, when the hearer doesn’t even know the language, are doing this, e.g.

& after that, I encountered a good explanation of Vim’s modality, & found out about vimtutor…

& tried it, again…

& then understood that by forcing my self to keep using Vim ( I’m autistic/woodenheaded, so forgetting what mode I’m in is much more frequent than it would be for neurotypicals ) applies-force to help break my unconscious-woodenness-of-mind, making my mind more levels-agile.

Through the years, it has worked.

I’ve not used Helix, which apparently is a modern improvement/replacement for Vim ( without much of the damn cruft ),

but modal editors do help make one’s mind more levels-agile, & THAT is immensely worthwhile: it is competitive-advantage that few others invest-in!

No, I’m not recommending Vim: I’m recommending modal-editors.

Find the one which works rightest for you, & let it keep bashing your unconscious-mind’s stuckness default-habit, & eventually you’ll be cornered by fewer bugs, be broken to failure less often, etc.

Morass-of-capability felt nice, but it was solving the wrong problem.

Modal-editing corrects one’s human mental-defect of not-changing-levels, to some extent, & that’s like being ambushed by a gang, except that one’s got what Crocodile Dundee called “a knife” on one…

  ( :

_ /\ _

So there’s where you live now? In the eMacs?