btw Evil is not the only package for modal editing ... I personaly don't like evil. But I like modal editing.

https://github.com/jyp/boon/ is one of the packages

@ejemba I like God-mode

@ajs yes it looks good I forgot about this one

@ejemba was testing boon out, do you use v and esc to activate insert mode, or do you bind it to tab?

Boon looks real nice, there are even Colemak bindings

I've been an Evil sceptic, but now that I feel like my fingers are getting tired after long runs of programming, I'd give something new a tr

@hlolli - Did your fingers get tired as you typed that message? 😆

I've used a lot of vim's features. Even read through the entire manual in college. I was skeptical when I tried emacs that evil-mode would be faithful enough to vim not to be painful, but I was pleasantly surprised. It's not 100% accurate to vim (nor should it be), but it's kind of amazing to me how many details transfer seamlessly.

Boon looks interesting, and more power to it, but I'm too entrenched in vim-style modal editing to want to try that experiment.

My problem with evil is that I don't know emacs. So when I inevitably end up outside evil, I can't move, type, change window, etc.

That's a fair criticism. Spacemacs tries to smooth this over by evil-ifying the keys, but there are still times I think I'd be stuck if I didn't kinda sorta know my way around using vanilla emacs bindings.

It's not really a problem with evil itself. It's a problem I have with moving to emacs, I guess.

These discussions always get me wondering how distorted my world view must be… I learned emacs in the 1980s, and since then I’ve been tempted by other editors, but I always revert back.

It’s Atom and Sublime and vim that seem like a weird adjustment to me

Vim was my first serious look at editors after deliberating over emacs & vim for days. I was writing python at the time. The modal editing and not being an operating system was what skewed me to vim. I'm now very jealous of the very cool features CIDER is able to have, whilst vim is just getting async support at all, and still uses a home grown language which doesn't make sense to me at all.

@dominicm FWIW, I had been vimming for many years, no emacs experience at all, and I switched to spacemacs about a year ago. There was a bit of a learning curve at first, but not too much, especially since the built-in help tools are really first-rate. You really only have to learn a very small subset of emacs-isms. And at this point I'd hate to switch back.

Anyone aware of a way to delete a sexp? That is, to delete it without copying it to the kill-ring? Sometimes I just want something gone forever. I’ve been trying to even come up with a way to do it with an emacs lisp fn…I haven’t found a way to kill-into-register, which would work; nor have I found a way to select a sexp (which would mean I could use delete-region). I'm using spacemacs' built-in sexp functionality (`evil-lisp-state`) on top of what's built into emacs.

@eggsyntax are you using paredit? That or similar structural editing facility should have that.

i think it will violate his "without putting into kill-ring" requirement

Yeah, I can kill-sexp with no problem.

I'm using evil-lisp-state, which is built on top of smartparens.

(defun ruthlessly-kill-line ()
  "Deletes a line, but does not put it in the kill-ring. (kinda)"
  (interactive)
  (move-beginning-of-line 1)
  (kill-line 1)
  (setq kill-ring (cdr kill-ring)))

ha. one suggestion: just hijack your killring

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/637351/emacs-how-to-delete-text-without-kill-ring

but some suggestions here

Ooooh, good idea, I like it. Thanks!

i think the kill-ring is an emacs data structure in ring-buffer.el. so there may be some kinda "api" version of this

not sure hwat kind of assumptions and invariants it may have

Yeah, I'll have to play around with that a bit.

In #spacemacs @alandipert just suggested "a simple function that calls kill-sexp and then pops the kill ring?" -- I think that's a pretty ideal solution, can't believe I didn't think of that one 😉

k cool sorry for the noise then, I should've read it more carefully 😄