Editing at the Speed of Thought in Emacs

After years of using Vim-style modal editing, including Evil mode in Emacs, the writer has switched to Emacs’s default keybindings and editing model. He argues that Emacs can support fast, fluid editing without separate modes: users keep editing, selecting, and running commands within one mode by holding modifier keys and pressing short sequences. This approach depends on ergonomics, since Control is used constantly. He uses home-row modifier setups on custom keyboards and recommends at least remapping Caps Lock to Control as a way to reduce strain. Unlike Vim’s reliance on modes to make movement comfortable, he sees keyboard hardware and remapping as the route to comfortable Emacs use.

The piece introduces the habits and tools that make this model practical. It explains familiar shortcuts for movement, saving, searching, selecting, and deleting, along with Emacs’s terminology for cutting, copying, and pasting: killing, saving, and yanking. A central technique is setting a mark and then searching or moving to define a selection, making it easy to select lines, paragraphs, or other text without changing modes. The writer also highlights help commands, keyboard macros, and Emacs Lisp customization, including a custom shortcut for selecting text inside or around brackets and quotes. Emacs keybindings also carry over to Readline and can be enabled in GTK applications. The conclusion is that native Emacs bindings are highly adaptable and particularly effective for prose, provided users configure their keyboards to suit them.