playing with microemacs

i’ve been playing with the jasspa microemacs editor the past day or so. i think if there weren’t a few things that vim did better in a cross-platform way (mainly printing – especially on windows), i’d be intrigued enough to try switching to it. i have used (gnu) emacs a fair amount in the past, but since i deal with alot of computer instances and virtualbox vms (mostly windows rather than unix), trying to get emacs set up on new boxes fairly often is a pain.

this has caused me to again try to wrangle vim into being a good editor for text creation instead of just text editing. i think that setting whichwrap to allow the arrowkeys to cross lines might be enough to prevent the cognitive dissonance of me having to hit a separate key when i just want to go to a previous line.

playing with vim

i’ve been making modifications to my .vimrc file today to experiment with stuff.

some of the things that i’ve added that i like are:

• set selectmode+=mouse
• set ww+=<,>,[,] – makes arrow keys go back and forth across end of lines.

one thing i’m still trying to decide if i like is:

startinsert – starts you in insert mode but doesn’t make systemic changes like "set insertmode" does

startinsert in vim

basically this command simply starts you in insert mode instead of normal mode.

i’m trying to figure out if i like it better. it’s really a question of whether you are optimizing for editing, or text creation. i’m pretty sure that for editing tasks, it’s easier to simply start where you can use the navigation keys off the bat.

however, i’ve been trying to see what i can do to adjust vim so that it feel more like an editor i’d actually want to use for writing text in. specifically unstructured prose i suppose, since i think it already works well for structured text like programming.

i think that it may make sense to use startinsert if i can train my hands not to expect to immediately navigate using hjkl the moment that the file opens.

vim indent file

here is the command to fix the formatting of a whole file:

g=gg

or possibly(?):

gg=g