Whether it's vim or emacs, I've always been amazed how these tools can become an extension of the brain like an instrument whose purpose is to materialize a thought process. Framed that way, the editor wars look like a pianist debating with a violinist of the superiority of their respective instruments to convey human emotion.
Watching a seasoned vim or emacs user create, mold, shape, reformat text like it was a piece of clay in the hands of a potter is truly inspiring.
As for me, my instrument of choice is Sublime Text (which, I guess, downgrades me to the status of a flute player), though I occasionally use vim for Ops stuff. I think there are some mac-centric UX patterns that I have a hard time giving up.
> I think there are some mac-centric UX patterns that I have a hard time giving up.
I can certainly understand that; I'm a relative newcomer to the platform, and while Emacs (of course) continues to behave regarding meta keys in the fashion I've spent a lifetime learning, getting used to Option-arrows for "move to next/previous word", and Command instead of Control for shortcuts, is really bothering me.
(Of course, that's mostly just because forcing the user to cramp her hand up like that, in order to access even the most commonly used keyboard shortcuts, is just a really stupid and un-Apple-like piece of user interaction design, and I've yet to find a good way to fix it.)
If you'd like to properly remap move to next/previous word and other commands in Mac OS X, I'd recommend Karabiner (which was previously called KeyRemap4Macbook).
I use it to map the emacs navigation keys for use across the OS, and find it really improves my experience. If you're interested in that set up, I use the following options, which are all listed under Emacs Mode:
- Control + PNBF to Up/Down/Left/Right
- Control + A/E to Command + Left/Right
- Option + B/F to Option + Left/Right
- Control + D to Forward Delete
Of course, I have caps lock remapped to Control.
There are also Vi remap options in Karabiner, plus tons of other stuff.
Disclaimer: I'm a bit of an emacs lightweight, so it might be that the remapping options aren't as full-featured as what a more advanced user would like.
I use KeyRemap4Macbook for a variety of purposes, mostly related to making a PC-style USB keyboard play nicely with OS X. It doesn't go as far as I'd like, though.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but it sounds like you're using one of the Mac OSX ports of emacs that tries to make emacs behave more like a Mac app. My advice is don't do that. Use emacsformacos.com [1]. It's plain ol' GNU emacs built for the Mac platform. I was so glad to find this and quickly gave up Aquamacs. I want my emacs to behave the same whether I'm on Mac or Linux (or Windows for that matter, but I'm doing less and less on Windows these days).
You've misunderstood me; my Emacs is a custom-built 24.3.1 with the railwaycat patch for OS X, so it behaves exactly as I intend it to. (All of my Emacsen are hand-built; I learned back in my Perl-hacking days not to trust packagers beyond a certain level of complexity, which Emacs vastly exceeds.) The problem isn't Emacs, but rather everything else.
To expand on that point: what I'm complaining about is the fact that OS X, and native apps, use the Command key, which is where Alt would be on a PC keyboard, as the meta key for shortcuts which on a Windows or Linux box are bound to Control. This is a terrible idea from a UX perspective in general, because every common keybinding requires a hand cramp to invoke. From the special perspective of someone who remaps Caps Lock to Control, it's even worse.
I'm probably going to end up remapping Caps Lock to Command instead, and reconfiguring Emacs and iTerm accordingly; it looks like that'll work out to be a pretty complete solution to the problem. (I hadn't previously thought to check whether iTerm supports meta remapping, but it does, so I can have my Command key behave as Control when I use it in terminal applications.)
Watching a seasoned vim or emacs user create, mold, shape, reformat text like it was a piece of clay in the hands of a potter is truly inspiring.
As for me, my instrument of choice is Sublime Text (which, I guess, downgrades me to the status of a flute player), though I occasionally use vim for Ops stuff. I think there are some mac-centric UX patterns that I have a hard time giving up.