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Evil Special Modes

This is a collection of Evil bindings for the rest of Emacs that Evil does not cover by default, such as help-mode, M-x calendar, Eshell and more.

Warning: This repo isn't receiving updates anymore, please refer to: https://github.com/jojojames/evil-collection.

Goals

  1. Reduce context switching: As soon as "moving around" gets hardwired to <hjkl>, it becomes frustratingly inefficient not to have it everywhere.

  2. Community work: setting up bindings is tremendous work and joining force can only save hours for all of Evil users out there. While not everyone may agree on the chosen bindings, it helps to have something to start with rather than nothing at all. In the end, users are free to override a subset of the proposed bindings to best fit their needs.

  3. Consistency: Having all bindings defined in one place allows for enforcing consistency across special modes and coordinating the community work to define a reference implementation.

Installation

  • Clone or download this repository.

  • Modify your load-path:

    (add-to-list 'load-path (expand-file-name "/path/to/evil-special-modes/" user-emacs-directory))

  • Register the bindings, either all at once:

    (when (require 'evil-special-modes nil t) (evil-special-modes-init))

or mode-by-mode, for instance:

(with-eval-after-load 'calendar (require 'evil-calendar) (evil-calendar-set-keys))

The list of supported modes is simply the list of files.

If you want to enable Evil in the minibuffer, you'll have to turn it on explicitly. This is so because many users find it confusing.

(require 'evil-minibuffer)
(evil-minibuffer-init)

Guidelines

The following rules serve as guiding principles to define the set of standard Evil bindings for various modes. Since special modes are by definition structurally incomparable, those rules cannot be expected to be applied universally.

The rules are more-or-less sorted by priority.

  1. Don't bind anything to : nor <escape>.

  2. Keep the movement keys when possible and sensible.

    • h, j, k, l
    • w, W, b, B, e, E, ge, gE
    • f, F, t, T, ;, ,
    • gg, G
    • |
    • (, )
    • {, }
    • %
    • +, -, 0, ^, $
    • C-i, C-o

  3. Keep the yanking and register keys when possible and sensible.

    • y, Y
    • "

  4. Keep the search keys when possible and sensible.

    • /, ?
    • #, *

  5. Keep the mark keys when possible and sensible.

    • m
    • ', ```

  6. Keep the windowing keys when possible and sensible.

    • H, L, M
    • C-e, C-y
    • C-f, C-b
    • C-d, C-u
    • C-w-prefixed bindings.
    • Some z-prefixed bindings (see below).

  7. The following keys are free when insert-mode does not make sense in the current mode:

    • a, A, i, I
    • c, C, r, R, s, S
    • d, D, x, X
    • o, O
    • p, P
    • =, <, >
    • J
    • ~

    Any of those keys can be set to be a prefix key.

  8. Prefix keys: g and z are the ubiquitous prefix keys.

    • g generally stands for "go" and is best used for movements.
    • z is used for scrolling, folding, spell-checking and more.

  9. Macro and action keys

    • @, q
    • .

Rationale (Work in progress)

Many special modes share the same set of similar actions. Those actions should share the same bindings across all modes whenever feasible.

Motion ([, ], {, }, (, ), C-j, C-k)

  • [ and ]: Use [[ and ]] for navigation between sections.

    If the mode makes no difference between the end of a section and the beginning of the next, use [ and ].

  • C-j, C-k: If there is granularity, i.e. subsections, use C-j and C-k to browse them. This reflects evil-magit and evil-mu4e default bindings.

  • {, }: If there is no paragraph structure, { and } can be used for sub-sectioning.

  • (, ): If there is no sentence structure, ( and ) can be used for sub-sectioning.

  • HJKL: hjkl can be used for atomic movements, but HJKL can usually not be used because H, K and L are all universal (J is evil-join and usually does not make sense in special modes).

  • C-h should not be remapped: Since we have C-j and C-k for vertical motion, it would make sense to use C-h and C-l for horizontal motion. There are some shortcomings though:

    • In Vim, C-h works as backspace, but Evil does not follow that behaviour.

    • In Emacs, it is a prefix key for all help-related commands, and so is <f1>.

    • Most importantly, C-h is too widespread and ubiquitous to be replaced. So we don't.

  • As a consequence of the former point, C-l is available.

  • M-<hjkl>: Those keys are usually free in Evil but still bound to their Emacs default (e.g. M-l is downcase-word). Besides, if C-j/C-k are already used, having M-j and M-k might add up to the confusion.

Quitting (q, ZQ, ZZ)

In Vim, q is for recording macros. In most Emacs special modes, it stands for quitting while macros are recorded/played with <f3> and <f4>. Vim quits with ZZ or ZQ.

A good rule of thumb would be:

  • Always bind ZZ and ZQ to the quitting function(s), evil-quit if nothing else makes sense.

  • Bind q to evil-quit if macros don't make sense in current mode.

  • If macros don't make sense in current mode, then @ is available.

Refreshing / Reverting (gr)

gr is used for reverting in evil-magit, evil-mu4e, and some Spacemacs configurations (org-agenda and neotree among others).

C-l is traditionally used to refresh the terminal screen.

Marking

Emacs inconsistently uses "u" and "U" to unmark. Since in Vim those keys are usually bound to "undo", they are probably best left to commands that undo actions in the buffer and not undo marks.

m defaults to evil-set-marker which might not be very useful in special modes. This is somewhat debatable though.

Suggested mark bindings:

  • m: Mark or toggle mark, depending on what the mode offers.

  • ~: Toggle all mark. This mirrors the "invert-char" Vim command bound to ~ by default.

  • M: Remove all marks.

  • %: Mark regexp.

  • x: Execute action on marks. This mirrors Dired's binding of x.

While m won't be available for setting marks (in the Vim sense), 'can still be used as it can jump to other buffers.

Optionally:

  • *: Mark all, because * is traditionally a wild card.

  • #: Remove mark. This is useful when we want to unmark a region having both marked and unmarked entries. But M could also be made to remove all marks on region, making this binding useless.

Filtering / Narrowing / Searching.

s and S seem to be used in some places like mu4e.

  • s: [s]elect/[s]earch/filter candidates according to a pattern.

  • S: Remove filter and select all.

  • = is also free and its significance is obvious.

  • | is not free but the pipe symbolic is very tantalizing.

Sorting

  • o: Change the sort [o]rder.
  • O: Sort in reverse order.

package-menu uses S.

proced and Dired use s.

profiler uses A and D.

mu4e uses O.

ranger uses o.

Jumping / Interactive "goto" (gd and .)

  • gd: [g]o to [d]efinition.

  • .: go to current entity (day for calendar, playing track for EMMS). Bind only if more relevant than evil-repeat.

mu4e has j in Emacs, J in Evil.

Browse URL (gx)

gx: go to URL. This is a default Vim binding.

Help (?)

If searching makes sense, keep ? for backward search. If not, it can be used to display help.

History browsing (C-n, C-p)

C-n and C-p are standard bindings to browse the history elements.

Bookmarking

?

Modes left behind

Some modes might still remain unsupported by this package. Should you be missing your <hjkl>, feel free to file an issue or even a pull request.

Third-party packages

To keep the goals of this package within reach, we restrict the changes to vanilla Emacs modes.

Third-party packages are provided by several parties:

Should you know any suitable package not mentioned in this list, let us know and file an issue.

Other references: