I recently discovered Meow as a modal editing replacement for evil-mode, and it has become a mainstay in my recent vanilla emacs configuration.
Meow piggybacks on the Kakoune/Helix style of editing (of which I had never used prior, and I quite like it!) to visually select and then act upon text in a way that makes sense. Essentially flipping vim’s verb/noun (dw for example) to selection/action (wd) means that everything is seen before acted upon. No more guessing if I wanted to “d 3 w’s” - I see the selection before I act. Theoretically, this means you get the speed of vim without the mistakes. In practice, well there is the muscle memory learning curve to overcome - which for me has been a few weeks of missed keypresses, nothing like switching to Colemak DH.
What meow allows for is a modal layer on top of vanilla binds, while avoiding the pollution of evil-mode in everything. .
Meow is the antithesis to this: tremendously lightweight, permitting emacs to shine through and do what it does best, all while being customizable to the point that I have replicated most of vim’s ideas into my keybinds without the evil debt.
Let’s discuss why I think meow is a great addition to a vanilla emacs config if you want modal editing without the weight of evil.
A return to vanilla#
Coming from Doom emacs, I had the desire to use the default emacs binds as much as possible as I moved to my recent vanilla config. I was already using C- a ton in orgmode, magit, etc. and found I was already using the defaults much of the time. The thing that I missed was modal editing within brackets/parens/multi-lines etc. and there are just ways the vim way of doing things are more natural to me.
But, I was over evil for a few reasons:
Pollution#
When you run evil-mode, you start to see how much it takes over. Evil is heavy, and slows down the configuration without a doubt. When I looked at my previous configuration, evil-define-key this and state overrides were everywhere, making evil a dependency that was tightly coupled with the way I used emacs. This was forcing me into reconstruction of emacs; I didn’t want to be held hostage any longer.
When you start to pull evil out of emacs, you see how powerful emacs is without the “vim pollution.”
Weight#
Evil slows emacs down, not just at startup time, but it is extra baggage that has to load in complex modes if you use evil-collection. Elfeed was a big wakeup call, in which my emacs would hang for seconds on updating. Since switching to meow, the lag is gone.
Emacs as a final place to hang my hat#
Emacs has been, for over a year, the only place I would edit text, or in recent months, generally use a computer. When I feel something is worth doing, it is worth going all in on.
Is Meow the final answer? I am not sure, but it seems like a very capable jumpoff point from evil to vanilla.
Keymaps#
By default, meow is built for the QWERTY keyboard, but there are defaults for colemak, dvorak, etc. But you probably won’t care as you can map keys however you want. I have gone and set these up in a “vim-like” way - in that many of the keys are “familiar” to evil/vim users, but also don’t fight the meow idea. You can see my keybinds here where I emulate Doom’s SPC leader, including some of the comfiest navigational keybinds, and my own functions.
God mode#
Meow has a built-in version of “god mode” in which you hit SPC as a pass through to any emacs keys, replacing modifiers for one-shot commands.
Instead of hitting C-x C-s for example, SPC x s does the exact same thing. This passes through to x, c, g, m by default, but can be customized to your ideal and so as not to conflict with other binds. So, you can avoid the “emacs pinky” excuse (though you are running a split, ortholinear, columnar staggered, ZMK/QMK firmware keyboard, right?) for not using emacs.
Multi cursor#
Not only do you get God mode built in, you get multicursor support with meow beacon which permits multi-line edits, as well as macro support with kmacro.
I have mapped most keys to vim-like positions, just to get up and running quickly, so I select lines with l, hit G to open multiple cursors, Q to start kmacro, and then @ to call the macro back. This is very handy for code editing specifically.
Composition#
With flash or avy, you can easily select precisely where you want to go, visually start a selection, and jump to another location. This is not just a meow thing, but composes well with meow.
Conclusion#
Meow respects Emacs for that which it is without trying to turn it into something that it is not. Will I stay in meow-land forever? I am not entirely sure. But - I do know that at least it has stripped much of the baggage I was carrying, and moved me closer to vanilla emacs binds. It doesn’t come with a massive opinion or try to lock you into using the modes across emacs, and it gracefully falls through to emacs defaults without conflict. All I do know is that my startup time (if one cares about that sort of thing) is now ~0.3 seconds faster because the heaviness of evil is no longer.
As always, God bless, and until next time.
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