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Show HN: Devil Mode: A twisted Emacs key translator for modifier-free editing

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Re: Show HN: Devil Mode: A twisted Emacs key translator for modifier-free editing

#31

Post by _a_a_a_ »

bitwize wrote: post #30
_a_a_a_ wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I completely get what you're saying it's not really fair to expect Emacs to be compatible with systems that came after it. If you going to work in Emacs you have to pretty much work on its terms, which I think is fairly reasonable and speaking only for myself, I found very worthwhile. If you think it would make it more accessible to have certain changes, email the Emacs issue/bug people with constructive sugges…

It absolutely is fair to expect Emacs to use industry standard terminology to avoid confusing users. At this point, keeping the outdated, idiosyncratic terminology and default UI paradigms serves no purpose except unnecessary gatekeeping. > (then try doing the same with Apple or Microsoft and see what happens :-) ) Microsoft, the authors of Visual Studio Code, the editor most developers use? Whose team has been laude…

> It absolutely is fair to expect Emacs to use industry standard terminology to avoid confusing users

"Initial release 1976; 47 years ago" (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs).

There was no such standard terminology back then.

May I recommend you avoid using Emacs to avoid the concomitant headache of getting involved in Emacs discussions, thank you.It clearly isn't for you.

Re: Show HN: Devil Mode: A twisted Emacs key translator for modifier-free editing

#32

Post by nickspain »

msla wrote: post #27
zevv wrote: post #18

Well, someone has to say it, right? "You might as well use vi."

vi doesn't have a good extension language. ( Actual vi doesn't have any extension language, but even Vim lags seriously in this realm.)

Neovim supports lua as an extension language which can be pretty nice. It’s by no means as nice as using a lisp but definitely a step up from viml

Re: Show HN: Devil Mode: A twisted Emacs key translator for modifier-free editing

#33

Post by Conscat »

msla wrote: post #27
zevv wrote: post #18

Well, someone has to say it, right? "You might as well use vi."

vi doesn't have a good extension language. ( Actual vi doesn't have any extension language, but even Vim lags seriously in this realm.)

I'm pretty impressed by the vim-quickui and (Neovim) conjure packages.

Re: Show HN: Devil Mode: A twisted Emacs key translator for modifier-free editing

#35

Post by msla »

msla wrote: post #26
susam wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. A really easy way to test this out on a modern Unix-ish system is to launch a terminal emulator, run cat, and then type Alt+a followed by Esc a. And then for bonus, type Ctrl+[ a. The output should look like this: $ cat ^[a^[a^[a

Interestingly, on my Linux setup, Alt-a gets me this for left and right Alt: á Ubuntu 22.04 I set up PrtSc as a compose key and have an .XCompose file, but that still works.

Through a little playing around, I figured it out: My Alt actually is a Meta key, in that it sets the high bit. Convert the resulting eight-bit value to UTF-8 and you get the observed behavior: 'a' is 0x61 (0b01100001) and 'á' is U+00E1 (0b11100001) in Unicode.

Re: Show HN: Devil Mode: A twisted Emacs key translator for modifier-free editing

#36

Post by lambdaloop »

For the past couple years, I've been using this hacked version of xf86-input-evdev (by Teika Kazura), which allows the use of a space bar for the space and as a "control" modifier if held: https://github.com/lambdaloop/at-home-modifier-evdev

I made a small modification so that if the space key is pressed shortly after a regular character, it just inserts a space immediately. This makes typing feel more natural, with spaces inserted as usual.

I like this better than using the comma as a modifier, as the space bar is nicely positioned on the keyboard to take advantage of your thumbs already.

Day to day, it's such a natural extension that I forget that I have this on. However, this is the first thing I install when I set up a new computer, as otherwise a lot of shortcuts are much more strenuous.

Edit: I just realized that, while editing this, I've been pressing space-backspace (aka ctrl-backspace with this module) to delete whole words. I guess it's fully ingrained now!

Re: Show HN: Devil Mode: A twisted Emacs key translator for modifier-free editing

#37

Post by schemescape »

_a_a_a_ wrote: post #21
munch117 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yank instead of paste. Frame instead of window. Kill instead of delete. kill-ring-save instead of copy. I was going to add 'visit instead of open', but I guess that bit has changed over the years. C-x C-v no longer invokes 'visit-file'.

While I completely get what you're saying it's not really fair to expect Emacs to be compatible with systems that came after it. If you going to work in Emacs you have to pretty much work on its terms, which I think is fairly reasonable and speaking only for myself, I found very worthwhile. If you think it would make it more accessible to have certain changes, email the Emacs issue/bug people with constructive sugges…

For the record, the intent of my original post was just to see if someone had already encountered and solved my problem (having difficulty finding Emacs commands, due to inexperience).

The use of “archaic”, etc. was meant humorously, and not as a complaint about Emacs. I wouldn’t mind if the maintainers added some more modern synonyms for commonly needed commands, but I wouldn’t expect them to.

Re: Show HN: Devil Mode: A twisted Emacs key translator for modifier-free editing

#38

Post by alwaysbeconsing »

SoftTalker wrote: post #28

The postition of the comma key doesn't (to me) feel a lot better than the normal position of the CTRL key. I remap CAPS-LOCK (which I almost never use or want) to CTRL and that works well for me in emacs to reduce finger contortions. It does create minor annoyances when I have to use a computer where this isn't the case, since it's in my muscle memory now.

Using a sequence rather than a chord (or tap vs. hold) makes a big difference and I think it reduces the necessity of having the perfect spot.

The author also mentions in the readme that it was inspired by laptop keyboards that are lacking that right-side CTRL, so even if it's not perfect for the majority of commands, it adds a little flexibility.

Re: Show HN: Devil Mode: A twisted Emacs key translator for modifier-free editing

#39

Post by _a_a_a_ »

schemescape wrote: post #37
_a_a_a_ wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I completely get what you're saying it's not really fair to expect Emacs to be compatible with systems that came after it. If you going to work in Emacs you have to pretty much work on its terms, which I think is fairly reasonable and speaking only for myself, I found very worthwhile. If you think it would make it more accessible to have certain changes, email the Emacs issue/bug people with constructive sugges…

For the record, the intent of my original post was just to see if someone had already encountered and solved my problem (having difficulty finding Emacs commands, due to inexperience). The use of “archaic”, etc. was meant humorously, and not as a complaint about Emacs. I wouldn’t mind if the maintainers added some more modern synonyms for commonly needed commands, but I wouldn’t expect them to.

The following is my personal experience only. When I decided to learn Emacs I bought a book (the fat O'Reilly one),sat down and practised the keystrokes. I made a few scratch notes as well. Within a few hours, not days, I found movement to be extremely straightforward and much more comfortable than the old windows/mac way, for the great part.

When I was doing my own project I would do most of my work in Emacs but regularly swap back to VStudio because of its LSP support. Swapping back and forth between these two very different environments brought on a few mistakes (wrong key in wrong editor) but astonishingly few. I got comfortable doing switches pretty quickly which is surprising because they are so utterly different, but that's how I found it to be.

I ended up spending more time in VS because of better LSP, but built-in LSP support is coming in the next Emacs. Good. Because once I went back to 'standard' keyboard commands, I never felt comfortable. It just doesn't feel right. Also Emacs is so vastly more capable in some ways it just blows VS away. In other ways VS is better certainly, in the more advanced technical stuff such as LSP, in other ways, screw it.

So: grab a book, prepared to put in a bit of time, good luck!

(Edit: just remembered, I certainly did buy the book but started off doing the built-in Emacs tutorial before that)

Re: Show HN: Devil Mode: A twisted Emacs key translator for modifier-free editing

#40

Post by alwaysbeconsing »

schemescape wrote: post #16
_a_a_a_ wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m aware of “apropos”, but it also uses antiquated terminology can you clarify 'antiquated' for me please

Here’s an example: M-x, “apropos”, RET, “copy text” No apropos matches for “copy text” Using just “copy” returns two undocumented variables first. I did eventually find kill-ring-save, but it took more digging than I’d like. Obviously if I embraced (or at least remembered) Emacs’s terminology I’d have a better experience, but I’m not there yet. Edit again: “copy selection” found copy-region-as-kill, which is maybe wh…

I'm sympathetic to this argument but I just searched apropos for "cut" and then for "copy" and got many commands related to cutting/copying text. Granted also that the words "copy" and "cut" don't seem to appear in the results, so you still have some reading to do, but the metadata is apparently there.

What version of Emacs did you try?

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