Trying out Emacs

After my post about how I would like vim to head in the direction of being an operating system just like Emacs:) I decided that perhaps it was time to take another drive into Emacs and see how it feels, it has been a while.

Now I really like vim so my first idea was to install evil and just use it like vim. I initially did this but then realised that I would not learn much about Emacs. Like learning vim I feel it will be best to just start with a pure install and gradually add to my .emacs file as I find things annoying or need a plugin for a certain language or workflow.

That way I will end up at an optimized set up for myself rather than having an optimized set up for someone else. That may or may not include vim emulation.

Vim has excellent navigation keys. However once I installed easy-motion I stopped using many of them except for during the creation of macros and movements within about three lines of my cursor. Emacs navigation around a file is a bit how shall we say less easy on the hand but it does have a similar easy-motion style plugin. Again at the moment I am keeping things pure and just slowly getting the default navigation keys ingrained, that and using search quite a bit.

I should add I have not mapped the caps lock key to be the control key as is often recommended. Taking slightly different advice I decided to use my palm to press the control key. Well the bottom of my little finger. It seems to work and as I spend most of my computer time in front of a full size keyboard it is not big deal.

What I have not found a good replacement for is vim's text objects. They let you rapidly change or delete text that is surrounded by quotes or brackets. This is an incredibly useful feature and is one of the crowns jewels of vim, well in my opinion anyway. I would really like an equivalent in Emacs and it is something I would start using vim emulation just to get. I won't be doing that just yet but if I decide to stay with Emacs it will be something I need to sort.