Tag: Ide

I love watching great ideas percolate through the file editor ecosystem. My cup of tea is Emacs, so I notice it most there, but it happens all over the place. For example EasyMotion appeared in VIM and jumped to Emacs AceJump and then to IntelliJ (and all its children). If you are an Emacs user then you also see it happen a lot between modes.
For example ESS has this nice feature of evaluating the current line or region and stepping forward. It probably sounds so simple to you that you would question its value. Oh yea, you know LISP, so you get it that simple is powerful. Obviously that idea will spread to every mode for every language, and here is how, eval-in-repl.
Today’s story-unfolding for me has to do with setting up your key bindings in order from least to most disruptive to your hands and arm position. Xah Lee gave me the idea. Here is how I do it. key-chord is what made it possible for me. It was so uplifting to start using it. My personal workflow was so improved and I didn’t think any more about how to make it better or how key-chord might serve other purposes. Then I read about key-combo.
It does what key-chord does. OK, that is great. It does a little more though. It cycles through through symbols, too. Why do I care? In ESS the function `ess-smart-S-assign’ helps you deal with assignments in R. At some point, both R and S used the underscore for assignment. The naming standards in R are OK with using underscores in names as separators, too. So what should happen when you hit underscore in ESS mode? When you hit underscore, it starts cycling through ‘<-' and '_'. It makes total sense and it is totally expected. That is nice. key-combo lets you easily do the same thing wherever you want. I want to cycle through umlaut-accented vowels. I want to cycle through escaped and non-escaped symbols in LaTeX mode (here is one way in org). I want to cycle through through the different equality functions in our favorite languages (=, eq?, eqv?, and equal?) using only the = key. So, I will.
This thing called EMACS is really a vehicle for fun. This thing called ALEC is really a vehicle for the expression of creativity. What a treat to be here to do so collaboratively with all of you fine human beings!

A few weeks ago a really nice post appeared. It explained how to use set-transient-map. Is is nice for all the same reasons that all keymaps are nice, and additionally, their transience. The example of managing text size is perfect. Everyone has that in their Emacs config. When we define a goal like “we want to adjust the text size”, we are virtually “in the zone” of performing that task. We just want to hit a couple of keys to make the font bigger or smaller and this approach makes that really easy. That idea, and post, quickly blossomed into a package and many new cool features.

That “zone thinking” is how most modes and features work, whether the authors and the users are conscious of this or not. Hydra makes you very conscious of this. Watch how quickly examples evolved into re-recreating most of what someone needed of ViM. Cool!

The user-interface feature of displaying available commands (while in that “Hydra”) in the mode-line really piques my interest about using Hydras to provide a very “user friendly” suite of features for new users. Granted, after you use the same features a lot your quit using visual helpers, but for new users, this could be really interesting.

This package has all of the earmarks of a game-changer. That is my gut feeling; it will be a major facilitator for expressing all sorts of creative approaches for creative expression in Emacs (or ALEC in my case).

For the last few months I’ve had a thought visit me more than a few times: “What would it take to implement ViM, in Emacs, without taking one peek at evil-mode”. That question was just in the collective conscious I believe. Very, very delightful to see it get answered in this delightful new package, Hydra.

Thank you Oleh!