boon: Ergonomic Command Mode for Emacs

What is Boon?

Boon brings modal editing to emacs.

• Tries to be as comfortable as possible. (See below)
• Remains lightweight (~300 loc for its core.)
• Attempt to integrate with emacs as smoothly as possible

Design

It is largely accepted that modal edition is more ergonomic than using keychoord. Boon attempts to make modal editing as comfortable as possible, by adhering to the following design principles:

• Spacial allocation first, mnemonics second: the allocation of keys to commands is based in priority on the locations of keys on the keyboard. Whatever is printed on the keycap is a secondary concern.

• Easy finger rolls: common combination should either be left/right hand alternation or easy one-hand rolls.

• Use of home row and strong fingers for the most used commands

• Easy navigation: many commands are bound to navigation. This facilitates moving around. Because movements double up as region-definitions, it makes manipulation commands (operators) more powerful.

In command mode, movement keys are bound to the right hand, while text manipulation is bound to the left hand.

Right-hand.

The leftwards (and upwards) movements are bound to the leftmost fingers (index and middle finger), while rightwards (and downwards) movements are bound to the rightmost fingers (ring finger and pinky.) Additional movements are bound to the middle column.

Left-hand.

The most common edition commands (cut, paste, parenthesis manipulation) are bound to the home row. The top row is (mainly) for searching. The bottom row gives access to regular emacs stuff (C-x ...) (C-c ...) and registers.

Text operators take as argument a region, which can either be provided by:

• an anterior selection,
• a movement command (vi style),
• or a region specifier such as word, paragraph, ... (temporarily overriding the commands, which are meaningless as text regions)

The keymap looks as follows:

Configuration

NOTE: Emacs 24.3 is required.

Install Boon (prehaps using MELPA), and add the following to your configuration:

(require 'boon-colemak) ;; qwerty mode not implemented (contributions welcome) (require 'boon-extras) ;; optional (boon-mode)

Comparison with other modal layers for emacs

As far as I know, none of the other modal mode care about ergonomics (beside being modal).

• Evil

In boon, quite a bit of emacs structure and user experience is retained. Examples: the x key gives the C-x prefix map. Interactive arguments are used for text objects.

Besides, Emacs is already customizable enough as it is: the core of Boon is just 200 lines or so. Figuring out all the ins and outs of Evil to do what I want would probably require more effort.

• God-mode https://github.com/chrisdone/god-mode

Allows to retain most of emacs. It is similar to "sticky modifier keys" in principle.

• Modal Mode http://retroj.net/modal-mode

Perhaps the work which is the closest to Boon.

• Modal Emacs https://github.com/joelmccracken/modal-emacs

Modal Emacs does not appear to be complete.