In the war between emacs and vim, I lean towards emacs, but what I actually use is jed. It’s a fairly minimal editor, great for use in a remote terminal, with syntax highlighting, smart indenting, and just enough features to be decent for programming in. After years of fighting with the defaults, I have finally figured out the configuration I like. Like all my other configuration files, my .jedrc is stored on github.

Some sensible defaults for programming

I prefer indentation with 4 spaces, not tabs, and do not want my braces to be on separate lines (1TBS):

USE_TABS = 0;
TAB_DEFAULT = 4;
C_INDENT = 4;
C_BRA_NEWLINE = 1;
C_BRACE = 0;
C_Colon_Offset = 0;

In text mode (especially when writing Makefiles), I prefer that the Tab key inserts a tab character instead of indenting the current line (the default). I also like those tab stops to be spaced 8 columns wide:

define text_mode_hook()
{
    local_setkey("self_insert_cmd", "\t");
    TAB = 8;
}

Custom Hotkeys

I prefer Home and End to Ctrl+A and Ctrl+E:

setkey("bol", "\e[1~");
setkey("eol", "\e[4~");

I like to navigate with Ctrl+Cursor. Up and Down skip an entire paragraph:

setkey("backward_paragraph", "\e[A");
setkey("forward_paragraph",  "\e[B");

Getting Ctrl+Left and Ctrl+Right to skip forward and back a word needed a little more work, because skip_word and bskip_word behave poorly at the beginning and end of lines. I stole a lot of this from ide.sl:

setkey("ide_skip_word",      "\e[C");
setkey("ide_bskip_word",     "\e[D");
custom_variable ("Ide_Skippable_Chars",
    "\n\t !\"#$%&'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]^{|}~");
define ide_bskip_word()
{
    bskip_chars (Ide_Skippable_Chars);
    bskip_chars ("^" + Ide_Skippable_Chars);
}

define ide_skip_word()
{
    variable p = _get_point();
    skip_chars("^" + Ide_Skippable_Chars);
    if (_get_point() == p) {
        skip_chars(Ide_Skippable_Chars);
        skip_chars("^" + Ide_Skippable_Chars);
    }
}

Those two custom functions do the right thing. To be perfectly honest, I would prefer Alt+Cursor, but I cannot figure out what the code for those is. I got these codes from typing ^hk followed by the desired key, but that doesn’t seem to work for the combinations I really want. I guess I’ll get used to this eventually.