I am currently playing around with emacs and happy with most of the concepts. But I really adored the convenience of the three vim commands: dd,o,O Hopefully you can tell me how to mirror them in emacs :)
dd - deletes whole line, including newline, no matter where the cursor is.
I found something similar to do the trick:
C-a C-k C-k
While C-a moves the cursor to the beginning of the line, the first C-k kills the text, the second one kills the newline. The only problem is that this is not working on empty lines where I only need to type C-k which is quite inconvenient as I have to use different commands for the same task: killing a line.
o / O - creates a new empty line below / above cursor and moves cursor to the new line, indented correctly
Well, C-a C-o is nearly like O, just the idention is missing. C-e C-o creates an empty line below the current but does not move the cursor.
Are there any better solutions to my problems or do I have to learn Lisp and define new commands to fulfill my needs?
For o and O, here are a few functions I wrote many years ago:
(defun vi-open-line-above ()
"Insert a newline above the current line and put point at beginning."
(interactive)
(unless (bolp)
(beginning-of-line))
(newline)
(forward-line -1)
(indent-according-to-mode))
(defun vi-open-line-below ()
"Insert a newline below the current line and put point at beginning."
(interactive)
(unless (eolp)
(end-of-line))
(newline-and-indent))
(defun vi-open-line (&optional abovep)
"Insert a newline below the current line and put point at beginning.
With a prefix argument, insert a newline above the current line."
(interactive "P")
(if abovep
(vi-open-line-above)
(vi-open-line-below)))
You can bind vi-open-line to, say, M-insert as follows:
(define-key global-map [(meta insert)] 'vi-open-line)
For dd, if you want the killed line to make it onto the kill ring, you can use this function that wraps kill-line:
(defun kill-current-line (&optional n)
(interactive "p")
(save-excursion
(beginning-of-line)
(let ((kill-whole-line t))
(kill-line n))))
For completeness, it accepts a prefix argument and applies it to kill-line, so that it can kill much more than the "current" line.
You might also look at the source for viper-mode to see how it implements the equivalent dd, o, and O commands.