Oliver Caldwell's blog
On languages, text editors and tools
Emacs: A few hours after exposure
September 17, 2014
The symptoms are starting to show: fever, babbling, countless browser tabs and an insatiable urge to learn Lisp faster than it can be typed. After just one evening of playing with my configuration I have a system for me to define and load configuration files with ease as well as sync my plugin files from a list. I am considering have it run it’s sync and update cycle on every load though, I’ll have to see how that works out. At the very least I need to define an update function, which I think I need to do through the interactive function.
My baseline setup includes evil mode, evil tabs (to bring me Vim tab functionality) and a stripped back UI. This means no glaring logo when I open it up, it drops straight into a buffer with no strange menus or scroll bars loitering in my peripheral vision. I can already navigate around and edit to my hearts content, albeit in a very simplistic manner, all thanks to evil mode. I am however finding myself instinctively trying to invoke commands from my menagerie of wonderful Vim plugins, I assume I’ll have to ease that out of my muscle memory over time.
My next step will be to hook in ace-jump in such a way that it behaves like like EasyMotion, I can’t actually work out how to bind things through evil yet, but it can’t be that hard. I use <space>{motion} for EasyMotion, so I should be able to set up a subset of that. Maybe it’s already been done and I’m reinventing the wheel, as usual.
I’m essentially using a sparse Vim right now, it feels like I’m running on some fresh machine with :set nocompatible and :syntax on in ~/.vimrc, strangely enough, I’m okay with this. I actually want to bring over as little Vim functionality as possible, obviously I want my modal editing and efficient navigation as well as familiar window management, but being forced to use the native solutions where possible seems like a good idea.
For example, I was going to bind :Explore to a netrw equivalent (I assume there is one…), but I’ve since decided not to because I assume there’s some Emacs command that is better suited to the job. I want to keep my Vim powers for editing and Emacs for, well, everything else. I may well have to break this rule at some point to get vim-vinigar functionality though, hitting the hyphen key to drop into a directory browser and then again to go up a level feels too good to leave behind.
I think I’m doing okay so far.