Colemak keyboards with Emacs or VIM [closed]

Question

I've been crossing things out on my TODO list. I've recently picked up Colemak. Next I wanted to learn Vim or Emacs. I was leaning towards Vim, however one of its benefits are sticking to the home row. With Colemak, the home row has been changed. I realize that I could remap the keys, but assigning the functionality to different letters is not extremely appealing to me (if there is any relation between letters and their function. I know movement is not correlated but I'm not sure on all the rest.)

I don't want to start an argumentative post about text editors, but rather receive comments from Colemak (or Dvorak) users about alternative keymappings and these two editors.

Thanks

Answer 1

Glad to see another Colemak user :)

For Emacs there really isn't a need to remap, since the initial "shortcuts" aren't designed to be close to each other. If anything, you're gonna be more comfortable using Emacs on Colemak than on Qwerty (at least I was).

In Vim it's a lot trickier since hjkl will be completely messed-up. Then again, I've always felt that hlkl was broken and should have instead been jkj; or ijkl, so a remap is probably a good thing. Here's a broader discussion about Colemak+Vim on the Colemak forum: http://forum.colemak.com/viewtopic.php?id=50

Answer 2

I've run with Dvorak for a number of years now (probably ~4). I have also used vim for all of the standard reasons you have to use vim like things (less, config edits that have their own editors (visudo, etc.), etc.). Emacs was actually the first Unix program that I learned (I'm a native to the Apple world) and I currently picked it back up after being castigated by Yegge's ramblings about how ridiculously awesome it is.

From a strictly keyboard layout stance, I would say that Emacs is probably the winner here because no remapping is required. Other than swapping the Caps-Lock key for a Control key (which should really be done period, the Caps-Lock key is like every keyboard's high-school hickey), I would say that every keybinding is more comfortable to use with Dvorak than with Qwerty. I especially find the constantly used C-x and M-x bindings to be very comfortable to type.

However, vim is really no big deal. 'j' and 'k' are still right next to each other. 'h' and 'l' are at least conveniently on one hand and are on and above the home row. Other than that, it's simply about remapping the keys in your mind for doing things in the editor that you want to hae happen. I personally don't see any reason to remap anything, and I'm high risk for RSI (hence the switch to Dvorak). For keyboard centric apps like vim and emacs, the fact that I can use them comfortably unaltered should be fairly impressive. :)

Good luck!