💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~oldernow › 2023-11-17-19-47-35.gmi captured on 2023-12-28 at 17:18:55. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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Re: I gave emacs a serious look back in the day

So, something that changed my life as an Emacs user was Helm-Mode fuzzy completion. How it works on my setup is I press a key-chord (META-SHIFT-3) and then I can type two or three characters from ANY available emacs command, and it will fetch the command that it thought I meant. I can either press ENTER to use that command, or press down arrow (or CTRL-n) to get to one of the other likely matches. It is fuzzy search, so I can type characters from any part of the command (e.g., "v l i" will bring up the "visual-line-mode" command). It keeps track of my history, so 99% of the time it guesses correctly, and the rest of the time the command I want is one or two entries down. I can also keep typing more letters to clarify.

So, I don't have to memorize a ton of complex key sequences. I just have to have a rough notion of what some command is called, and a few keystrokes of regular typing will get me there.

I vaguely remember that.

But I also remember concluding the vi[m] command to pipe some or all lines to a script's stdin and receive its stdout in its stead (:%!<command>) was plenty sufficient to accomplish mass editing things I was enamored of at the time, and it's definitely served me well in that capacity over the years.

## Everything is programmable

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## A nice interface for anything text-based

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Bravo! I'm too old and set in my editing ways to look even so much as sideways - let alone back - but appreciate a well-written perusal of what might have been.

Thank you!