Continuing my exploration of #meow keybindings for #emacs, I’m finding that just the process of getting ready to use meow is causing quite a few changes to my configuration, independent of meow, for the better:
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I am very habituated to having a bunch of vim-like keybindings for window (in the emacs sense) management which are under C-w in vim and evil. This won’t fly for meow, so I finally started using super bindings, adding s-w as the first super binding, and avoiding evil functions for these. I’ve been avoiding super for a long time since I use the windows key as super under linux. In ms-windows that key by default brings up the windows menu, and I decided not to rock that boat. With the pressure on to have at least a few comfortable vim-like bindings, I found a way to allow the window key to be used for super under windows, without much restriction (win-l and win-g being the exceptions).
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I use the capslock for my i3 modifier key, and didn’t have an equivalent for windows. Mapping this key to the old windows-key functionality turned out to be super easy with powertoys, and it’s kind of analogous to the i3 modifier, if you squint a little. The linux key mapping is to hyper, while windows hyper has been appropriated by MS to be something completely useless and difficult–maybe impossible–to bind to a key. So this seems like a good use of an available key, and I don’t want to keep the original caps-lock functionality as it’s really rather useless and can be a foot gun when typing in passwords.
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I had been binding M-w for other-window, that usage was already provided by a subbinding of C-w and now s-w. This allows some workarounds I had for magit to be removed, and allows using the binding when evil is not active.
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I’ve for a long time bound the function keys as sort of a keyboard driven menu system organized around errr… functional groups of frequently used commands. As I will need to use emacs macros if I stick with meow, I needed to provide something equivalent to f3 and f4. So I moved the kmacro original definitions to C-f3 and C-f4 respectively. I am hoping this works out with meow.
I’m not sure I’ll continue with meow (I still haven’t finished the tutorial because of all these yaks to be shaved), but the changes its been driving are quite useful and will be helpful if I ever drop evil.
