Emacs without Emacs

27 Mar 2016

Vim is a very expressive language for editing text, and many other tools provide Vim-style key bindings to interact with them, although the Emacs-style key bindings are often the default. (They are actually from Readline, which uses Emacs-ish bindings, but some of them are different, notably <C-u> works differently than in Emacs)

Most Vim emulators provide very limited and inconsistent behaviour (except for, ironically, Emacs), but I also find that in a command prompt, the Emacs bindings are more pleasant to work with. In this context, you usually only want to perform one or two actions, so switching between modes is both tedious and confusing, especially when it does not quite behave as full Vim would do anyway.

Here are the mappings I use most frequently in bash or basically any command prompt or REPL. Try them in other programs - you might be surprised by how often they work.

• <C-a> goes to the beginning of the line
• <C-e> goes to the end of the line
• <C-f> and <C-b> goes forward and backward by character
• <M-f> and <M-b> goes forward and backward by word
• <C-u> removes everything before the cursor
• <C-k> removes everything after the cursor

You might need to tweak the settings of your terminal emulator for the alt/meta key to be sent through properly.

I find these mappings much more appropriate when using a command prompt application, and if you ever need the full power of Vim, you can start a full Vim session to edit the command with <C-x><C-e>.