Which Style Set Of Keybindings Are The Best For Emacs, And "Why?"

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This has been asked here countless times. Search first, ask second.

This. Better yet: search first; don't ask.

If you want to stick with emacs, the simplest route is really to just use the default emacs keybindings plus your personal customizations and then get shit done. For me there are more important things to do than to master two different keybindings (was like you, using evil for prog and vanilla for org), you will probably end being mediocre at both rather than being really fast and good at one. At the end, it doesn't matter, I have seen many vscode(with no vim plugin) users being 10x more productive than vim users (have never met emacs users in the real world haha) Also got frustrated when something in evil didn't work as in vim.

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I learned on vanilla Emacs keys. Had a friend who told me Vim was more comfortable, so I started using Viper as a thin layer over Emacs. It was pretty good! Tried out Evil, but I didn't like how much it changed. I'm not a Vimmer at heart so the different concepts were strange. Started using Xah-Fly-Keys, and it's very comfortable, but I got a little bit frustrated by how many of the functions are custom and deny existing Emacs features. So I began defining my own keymap for XFK, and then realised that since I was discarding half of the package, I should just make my own. So I started using Modalka. Since then I've been moving back to the vanilla keys. My Modalka config mostly acts like I'm holding down ctrl, plus a few conveniences. I palm-press ctrl and use a custom keyboard, and honestly, I rarely turn on Modalka unless I'm on my laptop. I only make about 15 changes to the default keymap, like M-n/p for forward/backward-paragraph, M-o for other-window, and M-r for query-replace. It amuses me a little that I wound up back here. I think I would probably recommend Meow to new users who don't like the defaults; I've heard it's good.

The ones you're most comfortable with. Next.

Mostly my own xah fly keys style keybindings. Always found something not to my linking with evil (hate the hjkl) and xah (much better but still ended up with too many custom bindings ) so in the end i built my own modal mode and like it so far I still often use emacs native bindings when interacting with special modes like dired, magit and friends, because remapping Everything there would be too time consuming for not much(hello magit and your thousand keymaps) This is not optimal obviously but using your own modal bindings feels incredible when text editing, so i won't go back. And remembering the basic bindings help a lot when you're not helping a colleague on his laptop

Emacs doesn't care - what ever you like the best. The beauty of Emacs is that you can use your computer the way you prefer, instead of the computer telling you what to do. I am perfectly happy with default Emacs keybindings because I cannot properly type with all fingers, so Emacs pinky is not an issue for me.

Well, to be honest, some of these responses are kind of shmucky answers. What's relevant a year ago might not be good today. It's good to have these threads to see what people are using in the current modern year of our Lord 2022. ​ With that in mind, thanks for the positive responses. No thanks for some of the lame ones below though. All I am going to say is have an open mind to it. It's just a call to action to see what people prefer, that's all.

> have an open mind > some of these responses are kind of shmucky answers lol There haven't been any "game changing" innovations in keybindings for a text editor in the past year because it's a matter of preference. The answers here that you would consider "non-schmucky" are the same answers that are always given each time this topic of discussion comes up.

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Evil everywhere. Modal-like hydra for window and buffer navigation.

There's obviously no best answer here, but what I will say is that I feel it's essential to start using emacs with vanilla keybindings at first then switch to something else later if you still want to, especially if that "something else" is evil-mode. Anything you add on top of emacs makes it more difficult to build that initial comprehension, especially something that's as heavy of an overhaul as evil. These days I use [Meow](https://github.com/meow-edit/meow) and quite like it though. I recommend it.

You never know since there's always new keybinding packages coming out. It's always worth an ask.

I have been using `cua-mode` and it has been pretty good so far

No there aren't.

Worth an ask.

That's what search engines are for.

Whatever. Don't care for trolls like you.

"have an open mind" lol

Whatever troll, you know what I mean.