How to make M-x suggest vanilla keybinds with evil mode disabled?

User Support
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#1

I’m a new to Emacs with no Vim experience. Most of the novice resources I’m working through, including “Mastering Emacs”, assume vanilla Emacs. The biggest source of confusion are the evil- and doom- specific keybinds, so I’m trying to temporarily ignore them while I figure out basic Emacs. Apparently you can do that by toggling evil mode with C-z, but M-x still suggests Doom-specific keybinds. For example, M-x find-file suggests (M-SPC .), which works, but I would like to see (C-x C-f).

Is there any way to do that without risking potential conflict with current or future doom-specific configuration? A solution would ideally retain the ability to switch between vanilla and doom on the fly, without having to restart Emacs.

#2

Hi, you can disable Vim keybindings altogether, if you prefer. If I remember correctly you just have to configure your init.el as follows:

;;; in $DOOMDIR/init.el
:editor
  ;; (evil +everywhere)
  ...

then close Doom, run doom sync and restart Doom.

I’ve never used evil-mode so I can’t say if you can switch between keybindings.

Note: Since Doom also has custom non-Vim keybindings, when you run M-x find-file you will see C-c f f suggested instead of C-x C-f but both will work.

A few tips I find useful when learning more about my Emacs:

  • C-h f: shows documentation for a function
  • C-h o: shows documentation for a object (could be a variable or a function)
  • C-h v: shows documentation for a variable
  • C-h k: prompt to insert a key combination (example C-c f f), returns the function is bound to (if any)

Happy hacking!

#3

I’m aware of the possibility of disabling evil-mode entirely by uninstalling, but this would remove my ability to switch it on on-the-fly with C-z. I want to have access to Doom keybindings for learning them gradually, and entirely removing makes that impossible. Ideally I would be able to make C-z do everything it does, plus switch the suggestions by M-x from doom to vanilla and back. I basically just want to have something close enough to a vanilla Emacs experience to be able to follow basic Emacs and org-mode tutorials without constantly switching to the Doom documentation whenever there’s a conflict between what the literature I’m reading assumes and what Doom does.

I initially considered figuring out the relevant lisp code called by M-x when it makes the suggestions and modifying it directly, but I don’t know how well this would jam with future updates by Doom or base Emacs.