Editing Code in Emacs
When you write code, you want to focus on the code, not on the text of the code. This means a) you have to have a good text editing setup, and b) you need to have a muscle-memory level instinct for using that setup. The second comes with practice and with consistency (i.e. not changing your config too much too quickly). The first is what I will talk about here.
This document is meant for people who are current users of, or at least slightly familiar with Emacs. I won’t spend much time explaining Emacs basics - for example how incremental search, or compilation buffers work (I would recommend Mastering Emacs for that). But I will give rationales for the choices I’ve made in encouraging or discouraging certain patterns.
You can read this in two ways: The general Emacs commands I use to try to edit the text of programs efficiently, and the specific keybinds I use in my modal ‘command’ mode to make those commands as convenient as possible.
No Mouse, No Arrows
All text editing practices rely on minimising the work your fingers do by minimising the number of keystrokes and keeping your fingers as close to the home row as possible. This means no arrow keys and no mouse. This can be enforced by remapping your arrow keys to ignore , and by installing the package disable-mouse .
Modal Editing: Command and Insert Modes
Editing code is different from writing prose in that you spend a lot more time moving around the document, and moving things around in the document, than actually writing text. The actions for moving are more important than the actions for typing, and should therefore be closer to hand. This is the premise of modal editing: the “default” actions of most keyboard keys are to move, not to type. For example in the default ‘mode’, hitting ‘a’ doesn’t type the ‘a’ character, it moves the cursor to the start of the line. To actually type things, you need to hit a special key which puts you in ‘insert’ mode. Then when you are finished typing, you hit another key which puts you in the default (or ‘command’) mode.
My modal system is custom written and very lightweight - about 150 lines, not including the keybinds themselves. I recommend using a modal system, if not mine then someone elses, such as Evil or Meow. But if you really dislike them, you can still do everything I describe here in vanilla emacs, and most of the commands already have default keybinds. There are only four ‘custom’ functions I use: the half page scrolls, and the kill-whole-word/sexp. And all are very simple.
A note on defaults
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