EXTRA: Vim user moves to emacs, read more

Becoming a vim user was a skill that I craved ever since I was a junior developer, just starting with Python. I would see senior developers using vim and doing everything on their terminals and my eyes would get bright. I wanted to be like them. And just like the blink of an eye, I was stuck on vim, unable to get out (quite literally) and I started doing everything on vim. HJKL is the position where my fingers rest while I’m on the computer.

And then, I needed to code in Clojure. Now, using Vim to code in Clojure will make me look like a newbie. I want to go beyond vim now: I need to use emacs.

O-Stallman, I sinned my whole programmer’s life. I gave up on emacs once and used vim-repl instead. But I’m ready to try again a sip of that water named emacs.

Getting myself started

First thing I did at my new job was to create a dotfiles repo. I didn’t think about it before, but doing symlinks of your configs to your repo is a great way of keeping them synced. So my dotfiles repo [1] is just like this.

My setup is zsh, oh-my-zsh, kitty, vim, brew and emacs, all running on macOS. I’m using emacs-plus because I wanted imagemagick, however I don’t really like the .app scaling on a 4K display, so I prefer to use it on a terminal. Using kitty, I’ve added the config macos_option_as_alt yes so I can use ALT as the meta key.

For the emacs config, I’m currently using evil (because I still love vim bindings), cider (for clojure), ace-window (for window movement) and other stuff.

Workflows

Here’s a list of things I’m keeping note of so I can get myself up to speed on emacs.

windows and buffers

C-x 2 split above and below

C-x 3 split side by side

C-x b change buffer

C-x 0 close buffer

ace-window

M-o then a number will switch windows

Cider

M-x -jac to launch the clojure REPL

C-c C-c evaluate file

C-c C-t l evaluate test

DOOOOOOM

I decided to install Doom Emacs and things look pretty nice!

Doom shortcuts to remember

SPC TAB . - switch to other workspace

SPC TAB r - rename workspace

C-t - create new workspace

SPC h b b - view keybinds for specific command

References

[1] dotfiles

[2] macOS: Possible to bind alt or super key as meta? #155