A long and binding road

My muscle memory is a mess. I spent years in Vim and then learned Emacs. I started with Spacemacs so that I wouldn’t be too distracted by those nutty Emacs keybindings. It helped.

But I wanted to learn to configure Emacs on my own and so I powered through the learning curve and rolled my own configuration. I actually learned to (almost) enjoy the native bindings.

Trouble was at that point I was stuck between worlds. I’d hit Escape when I didn’t need to. I’d often confuse j with Cntl-n etc. It was frustrating because I constantly had to think about bindings. You’re not supposed to always have to think about bindings.

The thing about using Vim bindings in Emacs is that it always feels a little bolted on. As good as things like Doom Emacs and Spacemacs are at abstracting it away, there are always sharp edges. My attempt to configure Evil mode in my home-rolled configuration was a disaster.

While I believe that Vim’s modal editing is generally more efficient when editing text, it feels like a net loss overall. I’m going back to my personal configuration and the native keybindings. Let’s see if I can get comfortable again.