Hexnut @ambihelical@qoto.org

My third session trying out #meow….

My strategy with trying meow is the same as #emacs when I switched from #vim in 2015. I’m noodling around with it on a branch of my dotfiles repo. Basically I give myself low pressure editting tasks to see if I’m really ready to roll with the new setup. When I’m comfortable with that, I’ll try it for work tasks. My current task is editing my init.el file (using meow bindings) to convert it to #meow. I was able to remove all the evil config successfully but it is incredibly awkward atm. Other than not really getting meow bindings, the other stumbling points are kind of surprising since so much of this is very automatic after many decades:

1. Window (in the emacs sense) management. I relied on C-w commands provided by evil. I’ve been able to replace these with various other commands under the C-w binding, mostly leveraging the built-in winmove.

2. Undo and redo. Although meow has an undo, there’s no redo binding. I don’t like the emacs bindings, so I decided to go more mainstream on this one and use C-z and S-C-z for undo and redo respectively. I’ve never used C-z to suspend emacs, so it doesn’t seem like a huge loss.

3. Saving files. I used evil commands for these. The emacs bindings are ok, so I’m training myself to use C-x C-s. I’m already used to C-x C-c so this seems consistent.

4. Searching and replacing in current buffer. I really liked / and the :s///gc vim commands. C-s is a poor substitute so far. Still working on this.

Surprisingly, other than text editing, things are going well. I’m able to use 90% of emacs without issue. I still don’t grok meow bindings yet, so next is getting up to speed on actually editing.

Really, what are you all going on about … eurovision wtf….

filtering eurovision what ever the fuck that is, like a boss.

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.

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.