Last Updated: February 25, 2016
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570
· avendael

Text Editing - Keybindings

If you don't know at least the keybindings of Emacs or Vim, you're doing text editing wrong. You'll be more productive once you master either of the two. If you haven't configured the rest of your tools to use either Emacs or Vim keybindings, you should.

Use the following references to get you started. Choose your poison. I know both, but I prefer Emacs, although I might try emacs-evil in the future:

While Vim bindings might be more efficient, I prefer Emacs bindings because:

  • OSX has Emacs bindings by default.
  • ZSH and Bash has Emacs bindings as the defaults, although you can use Vim bindings if you like.
  • Readline has Emacs bindings as the default. You can configure it to use Vim bindings instead, but it's non-trivial.
  • Tmux and screen has Emacs bindings as the defaults. You can configure them to use Vim bindings instead.
  • I can.

You might prefer Vim bindings because:

  • No chording.
  • Modal editing.
  • Chainable commands.
  • Some websites have Vim keybindings (9gag and gmail for example).