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ShannonMax: A Library to Optimize Emacs Keybindings with Information Theory

64 points by sammy0910 13 hours ago | 17 comments

Something I love about emacs is the ability to tab complete the name of a command. I do know a lot of keyboard shortcuts, but I use way, way more commands than I know the shortcut for. Need to rename a buffer? M-x ren-buf TAB should do it. Etc.

setopt 9 hours ago

Me to, but to be fair, I think this is no longer unique to Emacs. See for example the "command palette" in VSCode; it isn’t "tab completion" per se but similar to e.g. M-x with Vertico.

BeetleB 5 hours ago

Probably he's referring to "fuzzy find"?

Yes, VSCode has something similar, I believe. But Emacs had it before VSCode existed ;-)

az09mugen 28 minutes ago

I tried Emacs a bit after using Sublime Text for a while. I'm still using Sublime Text to this day because muscle memory, but the experience got me a deeper understanding of the capabilities of Sublime. While Emacs is profoundly hackable it feels a little bit "rough" on the edges. Sublime feels less hackable but more "clean".

I did not get IDEmacs ( https://codeberg.org/IDEmacs/IDEmacs ) to work but it basically it's an editor I would use.

For now fresh ( https://github.com/sinelaw/fresh/tree/master ) seems to be very promising.

Anyway I traded very happily the command palette Ctrl-Shift-P in Sublime for M-x and few other cool things.

Emacs will always have all my respect because of the concepts it introduced.

goodmythical 6 hours ago

I was thinking I was crazy...I use command completion in lots of different applications...

snikeris 4 hours ago

This is cool.

While we're discussing optimizing emacs keybindings...I've found it key to have my bindings set up such that my thumbs operate the control modifier key.

kleiba 4 hours ago

I'm fine with the standard CAPS_LOCK is CTRL setup...

setopt 2 hours ago

I got a pretty bad case of RSI with that setup, since it encourages one-handed chording (e.g. pressing C-x C-s by holding down your pinkie on Caps Lock while twisting your wrist to tap X then S using other fingers on the same hand). It’s far more ergonomic to do two-handed chording, where you press one key at a time with each hand to the extent possible. For me, that meant using Karabiner Element (Mac) and Keyd (Linux) to map Return to another Ctrl key when held down (in addition to the Caps as Ctrl mapping). Then I can simply hold down Return with my right hand and tap X then S with whatever fingers feel natural on the left hand, without twisting my wrist at all.

BeetleB 2 hours ago

Indeed. I had RSI issues very early in my career, and the standard advice by ergonomists was "Use both hands when doing any multi-key sequence". If you're doing Ctrl-C, use the right Ctrl button, and so on.

Pay08 3 hours ago

I could never get used to that. I should probably try forcing the issue to see if I can rewire my muscle memory, but I'm afraid that it'll be a problem in places where I don't want caps lock rebound to ctrl.

lorenzohess 11 hours ago

This looks great. Would there be an easy way to generalize this program to tiling window managers? Maybe initially I can use this by modifying the WM to forward all its keybindings to a dummy Emacs instance. For WMs is the entropy theory also applicable?

oritron 8 hours ago

Some people use Emacs /as a tiling window manager/ :) https://github.com/emacs-exwm/exwm

sammy0910 10 hours ago

it should be -- as long as you have like the right logging set up, I think the theory would also be applicable.

currently the calculations in this library are done with a clojure jar, so if you're interested, you might have an easier time calling that directly

tra3 7 hours ago

Are there any similar tools for the OS as a whole?

I'm trying to switch to Corne keyboards and the key maps are critical.

Pay08 3 hours ago

This is theoretically pretty extensible, but you need an OS-wide keylogger. On the Linux side, I'm not sure if Wayland allows for that at all.

chills 3 hours ago

What do you mean, "the OS as a whole"? This is the OS!

aghilmort 6 hours ago

this is great / will try!