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To add to this: yes, full blown IDEs have shortcuts but they are hard to explore, counter-intuitive and hard to extend.


I think JetBrains has a great system to it.

cmd+shift+a opens a command palette with every possible command in the IDE. It matches as you type the name of an action, and every action has a keybinding shown to the right (if it exists).

Every relevant button generally has keyboard shortcuts right on them.

And pressing cmd+e opens a list of gui interactions you've made so you can repeat them (things like focusing buffers, clicking on a file in the project file tree, etc.)

Basically, if you know cmd+shift+a, you're golden for learning commands and key shortcuts.

In comparison, emacs/vim are pretty awful. I've done a few tutorials of each and while I could have spent more time learning them, JetBrains makes it stupid easy to start learning the editor.


Alt-x does the very same in Emacs. Every available command with tab completion and with the keyboard shortcut listed. I think showing the shortcut is new.

If you are not familiar what a particular command does you can use C-h f <function-name> to open the help page.

I think Emacs is really easy to learn after you get a handle of the navigation keys. Which you might already be familiar with from shell.


shift-shift brings up the same window, albeit with different prompts.


Shift shift is go to anywhere with fuzzy matching. But yeah, it's the same window, the command palette is in a tab on that.




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