Chimera

CHIMERA IS IN ALPHA Absolutely everything about it can change, use at your own risk

An opinionated editor built on atom, emphasizing the following:

• using the keyboard for all interaction
• eventual efficiency over easy of use.

WARNING: Chimera will install packages on your behalf as it needs them. As it's designed to be a highly opinionated text editor, it will override many default keybindings.

What's Chimera About?

Chimera is a complete text editing solution. It is built on top of the atom editor, and packages in the package repository.

From those pieces, it composes them together, and emphasizes the following philosophies:

Using the Keyboard for all Interaction

The mouse is a great tool for arbitrary navigation in unfamiliar environments, but if you're involved enough with text that you're looking for an editor, chances are it's an integral part of your day. For a core competency, you can take some overhead to memorize to ensure productivity gains in the future.

Eventual Efficiency over Easy Use Initially

Using Chimera efficiently means using it's keybindings. All keybindings have a learning curve, and Chimera adds a lot of them. On top of that, it uses vim for modal editing as well. But the cost is worth it.

Get all your work done in editor

Even switching out of your text editor, into your terminal or your git repo manager, is an expensive switch that gets you out of your groove. Chimera emphasizes doing the common workflows in your editor, so you can immediately return back to more coding, typing, what have you.

The Functionality

The Keybinding Layers

There are four layers of keybindings in Chimera:

• vim modal editing: this is vim-plus-mode
• (alt|cmd)-: frequently used commands
• (alt|cmd)-x ...: less frequently used commands
• (alt|cmd)-c ...: user keybindings

The full keymap can be seen by looking at your keybindings, and searching for Chimera.

The Packages

The packages installed by Chimera are (with corresponding leader keys)

• vim-mode-plus: use vim keybindings, and edit much more efficiently than without.
• git-plus ({leader} g): manipulate git without leaving the editor.
• multi-cursor (alt-n to create a cursor and move down): perform the same operations on multiple lines of text.
• sync-settings ({leader} b): save your atom settings across computers.
• project-manager ({leader} p): manage projects really easily.
• advanced-open-file (alt-o to trigger): great replacement for find files with keyboard only.
• goto-definition ({leader} i g): one of the must useful pieces of IDE functionality.
• termrk: (alt-t) open up a terminal in atom instead and reduce overhead of switching windows.
• jumpy: (shift-enter) easily jump to the section of text you want to edit.
• last-cursor-position: (alt--, alt-+): easily return back to what you were editing before.

What Editors Inspired Chimera?

Chimera is inspired by the following text editors:

Atom

Atom is the core that Chimera is built on. Coming out of the box with a slew of great features, it's a solid base for any editor.

a strong philosophy of extensibility

easy sharing of functionality through packages

easy, built-in system for package development

Vim

Even vanilla vim stands the test of time for editing text. It brings powerful philosophies for simplifying complex text operations to the table

modal editing

providing a rich set of keybindings available with a single keystroke

composable keybindings

applying the unix philosophy of small, composable units to text editing commands was a stroke of genius

Emacs

Emacs was the original extensible editor. Effectively a lisp virtual machine with a text editor built in, it provided an amazing amount of flexibility.

powerful key chords

Enabled multiple keys to be used in sequence to select a command.

ergonomic

Emacs was designed to be interacted with a (lisp keyboard)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-cadet_keyboard], which put control very close to the thumb. Chimera adopts this practice, but modernizes it with the use of the alt or command key instead.

(The choice of alt/cmd depend on the operating system. It is designated as whichever one is the key closets to the spacebar).

minimize context switches

Many used emacs as much more than a text editor: some used it to reply to e-mail, some used it to play games. A great philosophy to draw from that is minimizing context switches: it's great to be able to perform all the operations you need to get work done, in your editor.