Emacs Compatibility Tracking Issue

[morgoth]

Rather than a monolithic "implement emacs in Zed" enhancement request (which is inherently unactionable) this issue is a tracking issue for centralizing various Zed bug fixes and enhancements to better supporting emacs-like compatibility and operation in Zed.

Issues:

• Add command to exchange beginning/end of region #4697
• Add a mark / select mode #8580
• Adaptive wrap prefix? #8614
• Remove whitespaces from empty lines when pressing enter #9230
• Which-Key like menu #10910
• cut-buffer / yank support for ctrl-k and ctrl-y #14260
• Zed Terminal is slower to process ctrl-x than MacOS Terminal (emacs) #16214
• User-defined visual text substitutions (Prettify Symbols Mode in vim/emacs/vsc) #18420
• Visual overline syntax decoration like Emacs' "Decorate Tags" option in EDE mode  #20986
• Editor::KillRingCut should support for multiple lines (emacs) #22490
• Immutable project search (emacs occur style) #22943
• Add keep lines and flush lines command #23408

Merged PRs:

• Add emacs keymap #19605
• Implement readline/emacs/macos style ctrl-k cut and ctrl-y yank #21003
• Add emacs keybinds for previous/next/cancel in search #21921
• Improve emacs keybind with better home/end behavior #21923
• Emacs keybinding improvements (2025-01-02) #22590
• More Emacs keybinding improvements #22629
• emacs: Fix using emacs in embedded terminal #22779
• Add emacs keybindings for mark emulation #22904
• emacs: Add as Transpose Characters (editor::Transpose) #22974
• Add emacs mark mode #23297
• Add support for editor::SwapSelectionEnds everywhere (emacs exchange-point-and-mark) #23428
• emacs: Add support for paragraph navigation #25284
• Ctrl/Alt-V to select by page in Emacs keymap #30858

Comments such as "I need emacs mode to switch to Zed!" and the like are unwelcome here.
Please vote with 👍 below on this issue and the linked issues instead.

Editor note (@notpeter): Originally this issue was for an emacs keymap, a beta of which shipped in #19605

[ozanmakes]

An offical "Emacs mode" would be really nice. There is a couple of example user configurations over here: https://github.com/zed-industries/community/discussions/1653

At the moment the lack of a "mark" command is the biggest holdup. In Emacs, pressing Ctrl+SPC will toggle selection and let you use movement commands to select text without keeping Shift pressed. Any chance this could be added to Zed?

[notpeter]

For those following this issue we've recently shipped two emacs-related improvements:

• Add emacs keymap #19605
• Implement readline/emacs/macos style ctrl-k cut and ctrl-y yank #21003

Please try out the Emacs (beta) keymap by triggering the welcome: toggle bas keymap selector:

It's very basic at this point, but give it a whirl, happy to consider PRs with improvements / refinements.

Rather than close this issue I've repurposed it as a tracking issue for additional Emacs-related enhancements and I've edited the issue description above to include links to other issues.

One other update, sadly, due to issues with international keyboards we also opted to revert terminal.option_as_meta to default to false again:

• Make terminal.option_as_meta=false in default settings #19364

If you need emacs/readline style keybinds in your terminal which use meta / alt you will want to add this to your settings.json:

  "terminal": {
    "option_as_meta": true
  }

[maximvl]

I'm trying this Emacs keymap, one thing I'm confused about is how it should handle conflicts with default Zed keybinds, eg C-p instead of going to previous line currently opens project file search and C-a selects all instead of going to beginning of a line.

[michaelgruner]

I'm trying this Emacs keymap, one thing I'm confused about is how it should handle conflicts with default Zed keybinds, eg C-p instead of going to previous line currently opens project file search and C-a selects all instead of going to beginning of a line.

You're probably missing the base_keymap in your settings.json?

"base_keymap": "Emacs"

[maximvl]

You're probably missing the base_keymap in your settings.json?

"base_keymap": "Emacs"

I do have that, and I have some Emacs keybinds working, like C-n, C-e, but only those which are not used by Zed default bindings

[michaelgruner]

I do have that, and I have some Emacs keybinds working, like C-n, C-e, but only those which are not used by Zed default bindings

ctrl-p works just fine for me, as well as all the other navigation keys, yank, paste, save, search, etc... Using the default base_keymap (no custom key binds). The only thing missing for me is setting a mark with ctrl-space.

I'm in Zed 0.170.1 4b2e556bf3ff1c6cf98804cf6c855dd7776a4d1 on Mac. Here's my barebones ~/config/zed/settings.json:

// Zed settings
//
// For information on how to configure Zed, see the Zed
// documentation: https://zed.dev/docs/configuring-zed
//
// To see all of Zed's default settings without changing your
// custom settings, run the `open default settings` command
// from the command palette or from `Zed` application menu.
{
  "assistant": {
    "default_model": {
      "provider": "copilot_chat",
      "model": "gpt-4o"
    },
    "version": "2"
  },
  "vim_mode": false,
  "theme": "Solarized Dark",
  "ui_font_size": 16,
  "buffer_font_size": 16,
  "autosave": {
    "after_delay": {
      "milliseconds": 10000
    }
  },
  "hour_format": "hour24",
  "tab_size": 2,
  "base_keymap": "Emacs",
  "terminal": {
    "option_as_meta": true
  }
}

And my ~/.config/zed/keymap.json is empty.

[failable]

In Emacs, one can bind the same keyboard shortcut to different commands in different programming language buffers. It would be great if Zed had similar functionality.

For example, using the same shortcut to execute different run commands / tasks in Python and Rust files, e.g. python3 $ZED_FILE and cargo run respectively.

[EmasXP]

What do you think about support for s-expressions ("sexp" for short), like Ctrl-Alt-Left for backward-sexp and Ctrl-Alt-Right for forward-sexp?

Link to the GNU Emacs Manual: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Expressions.html

[michaelgruner]

Hey @notpeter I've updated Zed to 0.171.3 and I can confirm ctrl-space works as intended to set selection marks. A few improvements to feel more emacs-like would be:

• Copying with alt-w should remove the selection after copying
• Yanking (pasting) with ctrl-y is not working in the base keymap. I had to manually add it to my settings.

Thanks!

[pbgc]

@michaelgruner for now I defined alt-w as:

{
    "context": "Editor",
    "bindings": {
      "alt-w": ["workspace::SendKeystrokes", "cmd-c ctrl-g"],
    .....

so the selection is removed after copying.

I also had to define ctrl-y in my keymap (it was working before)

[michaelgruner]

Thanks, since we are sharing, I also did your trick for cut and mapped tab to auto-indent, which emacs had spoiled me already:

            "tab": "editor::AutoIndent",
            "alt-w": ["workspace::SendKeystrokes", "cmd-c ctrl-g"],

[pbgc]

@michaelgruner thanks! the tab mapped to auto-indent was one of the things I really was missing from emacs! I defined it like this to be able to keep using tab to auto-complete the ai sugestions:

  {
    "context": "Editor && !inline_completion && !showing_completions",
    "use_key_equivalents": true,
    "bindings": {
      "tab": "editor::AutoIndent"
    }
  },

[devcexx]

Hes, I've also felt that we're missing something feature for "exiting from the selection mode if something happens" (yes, probably the "something happens" is not pretty well defined). Even though the workspace::SendKeystrokes sounds like a workaround, stills forcing you to define a new "Copy without cancel" keybinding so you can reference it from your normal copy action, that includes canceling to exit.

Also I feel that having a fixed set of actions that automatically exits from the selection mode may not fit satisfy everyone, depending on which actions you consider that should getting out of there.

From my perspective, it sounds like a good alternative for this should be allowing multiple actions to be ran with a single keybinding, that would prevent the need of hacking the configuration. This would have the counterpart, however, that it would require you to think on every possible keystroke that you want to get you out of the selection mode, but that's probably more an issue of curating some default config that people can use to build on top of.

[doviethoa]

I recently switch to Zed from Emacs and also found not being able to deactivate selection mark mode automatically is a bit annoying. So I created #35677 to address it. The idea is to deactivate selection mark mode after an action by default unless it is any of the select_<movement> actions.

Could someone try it out and feedback please? Thank you.

[failable]

In Emacs, one can select and page up/down at the same time. I wish we can do it in Zed with and without the selection context. #9015

[notpeter]

Can you explain further? If you want to be able to expand your selection to pages above and below the current selection point I think you can do something like: ctrl-space pagedown ctrl-x ctrl-x pageup -- are you looking for something different?

[Velnbur]

Can Meta key be remapped to Command instead of Option in Mac?

[notpeter]

Not currently. You can do it in macOS for all apps, and I believe there are some third party apps which can do it per-application (BetterTouchTool perhaps?).

There's an issue. Upvote 👍 and subscribe to track progress:

• Allow remapping modifier keys #12708

[devcexx]

I've recently seen the new selection_mode feature integrated on Zed and it's really nice thing to have. It was actually one of my blockers to move to Zed so now I can start the transition! I've noted however, that the "SetMark" is likely missing a "PopMark" counterpart, emulating the Emacs mark ring. This is a feature similar to what is implemented for Vim (#25702), but with a stack of past marks instead of having marks accessible with different keys.

[notpeter]

Would you be willing try and write up a scope for this feature request: the data structures, the actions/keybinds and their associated behaviors?

[failable]

Emacs key bindings like Ctrl-x p f have led to unexpected behavior right now.

Zed: v0.200.1 (Zed Preview) 
OS: macOS 15.6.0
Memory: 64 GiB
Architecture: aarch64