Meow Made me Leave Evil-Mode - The Universe of Joshua Blais

[giscus[bot]]

Meow Made me Leave Evil-Mode - The Universe of Joshua Blais

A blog, notes, gallery, lifestyle and fully conglomerated posts from Joshua.

https://joshblais.com/blog/meow-in-emacs/

[EmacsOSUser]

SHAME, this may not e of pagan faith, but heretical it is.

[aidan-hall]

Over time I've come to prefer using small packages that require minimal configuration and compose well with the rest of the Emacs environment. I enjoy some of what Meow does, but at times it feels like three or four different packages cobbled together, as you observe. The meow-visit and meow-block commands offer pale imitations of avy and expand-region/expreg respectively, but you can't simply drop those more powerful packages in, because they don't compose well with Meow's editing style.

I honestly find Meow's modal editing capabilities fairly uninspiring, especially since you are dropped back to vanilla Emacs keys when doing a multi-cursor edit. The most interesting parts of Meow are beacon and keypad, both of which have been replicated as stand-alone packages: see evil-keypad, devil and macrursors.

Meow's keypad does stand out as an excellent example of composing with the rest of the environment. Unlike evil's leader mappings, it does not require a whole separate set of keybinding definitions. keypad offers an alternative interface to access Emacs' default bindings

[aidan-hall]

... as well as users' personal bindings in the C-c <letter> space. Once you internalise the translation between keypad and default bindings, you can fluidly access the same set of bindings through both interfaces interchangeably.