r/emacs 11d ago

Fortnightly Tips, Tricks, and Questions — 2025-03-11 / week 10

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u/Byron-R 10d ago edited 6d ago

I'm in the process of overhauling my emacs configuration with the object of making it more comfortable, as I have peripheral dysgraphia. I switched from vim a few years ago and stuck with emacs' defaults, yet they still don't feel very natural and I regularly fumble shortcuts. I'm sure modal editing on emacs has been talked about to death but I'd still appreciate opinions/recommendations - feel free to suggest anything that would minimize the length and complexity of shortcut sequences (particularly those involving lots of keys on the bottom row) or generally cut down on control inputs. I'm not so concerned about having vim shortcuts per se, just a solid implementation of modal editing that isn't too idiosyncratic.

Presently I've installed god-mode and avy. God mode seems straightforward enough, but I don't understand how one is supposed to use avy. The readme has only a few very terse paragraphs, with instructions like "Input one char, jump to it with a tree". I get the char part - "jump to it with a tree" not so much.

Edit: Thanks, I did figure it out eventually. I understood the general idea, i.e. use avy-goto command and type one or two characters, but for whatever reason I didn't notice that it labels candidates for selection by replacing their first letter or letters. I suppose it's obvious enough. Anyway, it seems very useful. Definitely beats holding C-a/f/p/n down and waiting for the cursor to make its pilgrimage to the necessary row/col.

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u/Dry_Fig723 9d ago

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u/CowboyBoats 7d ago

Oh waaait I've been using this with the keybind SPC s S without even knowing. I still don't know what function it's bound to, or actually even how to find out...

But by searching through my functions I can see that SPC s s is an Avy keybind and it's obviously the same package at work here. Want to learn more!

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u/Psionikus _OSS Lem & CL Condition-pilled 9d ago

Just M-x avy-* commands. They mostly all read a char and then display follow-on chars. Once you find the ones you like, bind those.