general.el and two ways to define keybindings
When I abandoned spacemacs I really wanted to duplicate its keybindings using
SPC as leader key and per-mode bindings available by pressing ,. I found a
nice setup using general.el in Tianshu Wang's Emacs config. I made only minor
modification and ended up with the following setup.
(use-package general :after (evil evil-easymotion) :config (general-evil-setup) (general-auto-unbind-keys) (general-define-key :states '(normal insert motion visual emacs) :keymaps 'override :prefix-map 'tyrant-map :prefix "SPC" :non-normal-prefix "M-SPC") (general-create-definer mes/tyrant-def :keymaps 'tyrant-map) (mes/tyrant-def "" nil) (general-create-definer mes/despot-def :states '(normal insert motion visual emacs) :keymaps 'override :major-modes t :prefix "," :non-normal-prefix "M-,") (mes/despot-def "" nil) (general-def universal-argument-map "SPC u" 'universal-argument-more))
One slightly surprising thing I found out is that two different ways to define keybindings can be used, one seems to work on both top and mode level, the other only on mode level.
Top-level keybindings (SPC)
At the top-level, i.e. when using mes/tyrant-def, I need to use a cons based
configuration. This is part of my top-level keybindings:
(mes/tyrant-def "SPC" '("M-x" . execute-extended-command) "TAB" '("latest buffer" . mode-line-other-buffer) "!" 'shell-command "/" '("search" . consult-ripgrep) "u" 'universal-argument "b" (cons "bufs" (make-sparse-keymap)) "bb" '("switch" . consult-buffer) "bc" '("close" . kill-this-buffer) "be" '("erase" . erase-buffer) "bs" '("scratch" . scratch-buffer) ;; .... )
When it's done this way which-key picks up the descriptive strings.
It did take me a while to figure out that this config style was necessary. Again Tianshu Wang's Emacs config was what led me right.
Mode-level keybindings (,)
At the mode-level, i.e. using mes/despot-def, I've found that I can, almost
always, define keybindings following the documentation of general.el. Here's the
keybindings I have for nix-mode:
(mes/despot-def nix-mode-map "=" '(:ignore t :wk "format") "=b" '(nix-format-buffer :wk "buffer"))
Just the other day I found that AUCTeX must be doing something with it's keymaps
and I have to use the cons-based configuration style for its keymaps.