Hexnut @ambihelical@qoto.org

@galdor I agree shorter lines helps readability of prose but breaking up an expression because it is 88 characters long does nothing for its readability and can make it much harder to scan.

My second session trying out #meow did not go well. However I found out something important.

Unlike #evil meow uses the built-in #emacs keybindings in its implementation (instead of binding to commands). So if I rebind C-b and C-f, then h and l don't work as expected but now move up and down by a page.

There's actually a note about it in the sources, and there's apparently a reason, but now I have to find new keybindings for anything that collides with emacs built-in keybindings. So that includes a number of #vim bindings that I'd rather have than the built-in bindings.

Oh well, I guess I'll have to adapt more than expected to use meow.

oof, I meant hjkl. And there are other bindings that are similar, it will all help I'm sure.

After having used vi-like keybindings for over 30 years, I've decided to try something new and give #emacs #meow a try. The fact that ijkl are there in the default qwerty bindings is a huge plus, and means I can hobble around initially and not completely loose all of my muscle memory (I still use vim occasionally). I am looking forward to jettisoning a ton of evil specific configuration if I can adapt to meow.

The first road-bump I encountered was that the cheat-sheet came up all wonky, so had to spend the first hour or so figuring that out. Turns out I was using whitespace-mode for text files, and that turns on font-lock-mode which messes up the formatting. I think I did that to lazily get whitespace-mode for some text-mode derived modes, so easy fix.

Now that I can cheat, the next road bump are the window management keystrokes under ^W, some of which I've grown accustomed to. Haven't tackled that one yet, and so any ideas are appreciated.

@rustnl I feel quite strongly that ferris would be showing his tightey whiteys from that angle.

@techflails moving around with your fingers on home row is a good reason. Arrow keys are hard to reach. Meow does look interesting tbh. I’d rather keep a few vim keys due to muscle memory if at all possible.

@wilfredh I'm still getting used to it, and can't really say any particular feature stands out in particular, but in general the whole stack of vertico/consult/embark/orderless,etc seems very well designed and modular. None of the components is explicitly dependent on the other pieces, so any of them can be replaced.

I think it's worth it. I switched from few years of ivy/counsel (I used helm before that). There is obviously some awkwardness switching over, finding replacements for things you are used to, key bindings, etc. So I'd allow for that period of adjustment. You won't be able to just drop it in.

I really like how #emacs has been over the last few years sprouting packages that integrate well with existing emacs functionality. This is in contrast with older do-it-all packages like helm, ivy/counsel which in my usage have been replaced with vertico/consult/etc and projectile which has been replaced by project.el.

Case in point, someone I follow recently extolled the use of helm-apropos, but in #vertico, the emacs command describe-symbol is enhanced with vertico's narrowing framework without having to bind to any new functions. It may be not 100% the same as the helm function (I don't know I've not used it), but it does the job well enough in a nice and neatly engineered way.

I really appreciate this burgeoning attention to engineering, orthogonality and separation of concerns. As a software developer myself, I strongly believe this is the way to go.

@galdor @ddrake

Helm isn't a requirement for this, there are other narrowing history search packages. If you use consult like me, consult-history seems to work, although I haven't gave it a workout yet.

@Natureshadow@floss.social This is the best one I've found: https://aloso.github.io/2021/03/28/module-system.html
Do you think it would have helped?

Noice

@freemo The ban corresponds to a number of years where there were zero deaths. So I guess I am integrating the curve in my mind. But honestly, thinking about it a bit more, it's probably the # incidents (not deaths) AND the use of assault rifles in the incidents which would be the more useful data to show. Showing the total deaths is more about the effectiveness of the planning (for lack of a better term, ugh) more than what guns were used. 1999 was Columbine for example, which is almost 1/2 of that red peak.

@rdaily @freemo looks pretty flat to me until ban overturn. But in any case the data are useless without info on how many of those shootings involved assault weapons that were acquired during the ban.