I’ve been using vim/Neovim since 1999, and the amount of muscle memory that I’ve built up is deeply ingrained. I’m thinking that it may be time to branch out a bit and try my hand at emacs. How would you recommend dipping my toes into the emacs tackle box?
Grab Doom Emacs, it has evil-mode very well integrated and the space bar leader key setup should come natural.
I’ve used Emacs for a while now (since '89 or so) but had to learn vi really well as I spent most of the ‘90s on all sorts of Unix machines that invariably had vi (or ex, and ed, of course) and never Emacs, so I got to appreciate the friendliness of the modal model of interaction over Emacs’ use of lots-of-modifier-keys. I think it’s more ergonomic, even though it’s not always perfect at times, so I use a mixture.
Oh, and swap Ctrl and Caps Lock. That Caps Lock key has no business sitting where it sits on the PC keyboard, that’s what you get when a typewriter factory starts building computers. Thanks, IBM. For Emacs especially I feel it makes the modifier combinations a bit easier on the left hand.
They actually got that right the first time. Then they listened to user feedback (but granted, everything besides capslock was an improvement on the AT keyboard). Oh and of course those keyboards are still to this day the best ever made with nobody being able to surpass IBM’s engineering, but that’s another story.