Seeing the Light of God-Mode

My complaint about God-Mode was the fact that it doesn’t work within Emacs’ keybinding system. In short, it makes Emacs act as though Control is held all the time, with specially bound keys to temporarily use other prefixes like M- or C-M-. On reflection, this is actually really good, because it just makes the default keybindings easier to use. In fact, it sort of pushes the ergonomics of Emacs’ default keybindings to the extremes.

It’s easy to enter chords with the same modifier on consecutive keys (e.g. C-x C-f for find-file becomes xf), which I’ve seen referred to as “editing tempo”, apparently by Mastering Emacs, although I couldn’t immediately find where. Conversely, chords that were already obviously bad, like outline-hide-body (which is bound to C-c @ C-c) seem even worse by comparison, since God-Mode’s assumptions don’t match well with them (the best I could do was c SPC @ C-c).

God-Mode thankfully does not trample over transient keymaps (as in set-transient-map and repeat-mode), so these two systems neatly blend together for a surprisingly smooth experience (by Emacs’ standards).

Due to the default binding of g to activate the Alt/Meta prefix, there are actually a few bindings that end up the same similar reminiscent of Vim:

• gq: Fill paragraph.
• gu: Change the case of some text.

Since God-Mode just enhances the default bindings’ ergonomics, rather than stacking new ones on top, you don’t need to remember multiple sets of bindings. Once I worked out the mental mapping from default key “notation” to God-Mode’s input system, I was able to start using it at high speed almost immediately, since I’d already familiarised myself with the default bindings.

An additional benefit of this is that I won’t have to worry about throwing away loads of special God-Mode keybindings¹ if I decide to stop using it in the future. Here’s my (quite possibly final) God-Mode config:

;;;; God Mode
(use-package god-mode
  :ensure t
  :init
  (setq god-mode-enable-function-key-translation nil)
  :config
  (keymap-set god-local-mode-map "." #'repeat)
  (keymap-set god-local-mode-map "i" #'god-local-mode)
  (cl-pushnew '("," . "C-M-") god-mode-alist)
  (keymap-global-set "C-z" 'god-local-mode)
  (mapcar (lambda (mode)
            (cl-pushnew mode god-exempt-major-modes))
          '(erc-mode))
  (defun my-god-mode-update-cursor-type ()
    (setq cursor-type (if (or god-local-mode buffer-read-only) 'box 'bar)))

  (add-hook 'post-command-hook #'my-god-mode-update-cursor-type))

It was actually kind of hard finding a better key than G (the default) for C-M-. The ; and j keys were strong contenders given their home row position, but there are a lot of keybindings that use C-j and C-;, which would be trampled by this. Fortunately, C-, is decidedly less common, so the awkward placement is almost excusable. At least it’s better than having to press shift when the whole point of these keybindings is to make keybindings easier to type.