This minor mode intends to provide a faster handling of Emacs during actual file editing.

Let's face it, the navigation in plain Emacs is not that sophisticated. Actually, it's almost unusable. The approach of Evil-mode, on the other hand, is not a bad idea but I never really liked the way VI is doing things. Context switches are just not my style. I definitely prefer the key combination approach of Emacs.

So what can be done instead? Well, why not creating a mixture of both worlds?

In the lightning-keymap-mode a keymap tailored for fast navigation and editing is superimposed on top of your regular keymaps using a minor mode. Since this might shadow some essential key bindings you use on a regular basis, you can turn the mode on and off using F5.

There are two basic ideas to this package:

1. Navigation happens using the j, k, l, and ; keys and there are a bunch of useful and frequently used commands placed on the surrounding keys (like killing (cutting), yanking (pasting), copying, line breaks etc.)
2. There are several different 'layers' invoked by the Ctrl, Meta, and Shift key (and combinations of these). While the Ctrl key is invoking basic (slow) navigation, like moving forward or backward one line or character, the Meta key speeds things up by moving forward or backward a word or paragraph. The combination of both features the most fast behaviour (e.g. Ctrl + Meta + ; will move the point to the end of a line and Ctrl + Meta + l to the beginning of the buffer). A notable exception is Meta + Shift, which is used to navigate between buffers.

The second idea is also applied on most of the additional key bindings: Ctrl + , deletes backwards a character, Meta + , deletes backwards a word, and Ctrl + Meta + , deletes the current line (apart from this, those commands are also sensitive towards marked regions).

The evaluation of code chunks bound to the n key are currently just supported for ESS and python-mode.

Make sure you have an Emacs 25.1 or newer installed.

In order to use the lightning-keymap-mode, you have to clone this repository to your local device

git clone [email protected]:theGreatWhiteShark/lightning-keymap-mode.git

and add the following lines to your .emacs file in your home folder.

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/PATH-YOU-CLONED-LIGHTNING-KEYMAP-MODE-TO")
(require 'lightning-keymap-mode)
(lightning-keymap-mode 1)

By setting the lightning-basic-keymap variable to non-nil, the user can decide whether she wants to use just the basic navigation and line breaking instead of the full keybindings offered by the lightning-keymap-mode.

If the variable lightning-keymap-mode-modifies-string-replacement is set to non-nil, not the internal string-replace function, but a customized version lightning-keymap-mode-replace-string will be used. Within this function the default option of the FROM argument of the replacement function (what to replace) will be set according to word at point (at the current position). Therefore, it loses the ability to perform the last replacement as the default. You are free to decide on your own which functionality you find more useful.

For additional information and customization please refer to the customization group Editing > Lightning or the comment section in the beginning of lightning-keymap-mode.el.

If you plan to use YASnippet in combination with lightning-keymap-mode, be sure to use a YASnippet version >= 0.12.0!

This package is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 3, as published by the Free Software Foundation.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty; without even the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

A copy of the GNU General Public License, version 3, is available at http://www.r-project.org/Licenses/GPL-3