Changing dotspacemacs-command-key to ";" has no effect in dired

[stephenkraemer]

Problem

I set dotspacemacs-command-key to ";" in my .spacemacs file. This allows me to run evil-ex with ; in all modes, but it does not work in dired. If by muscle memory you always try to exit dired with ";bd", this can be really anyone, because it marks files for deletion instead.

Background

I had no luck solving this on my own. I asked in gitterchat and @TheBB pointed me in the direction of a minor mode shadowing the ";" key. What I have found out

1. When you run C-h k in dired, you see that ";" is a prefix binding. E.g. "; s runs the command epa-dired-do-sign"
2. When you run C-h m and look for ";", under the "Dired by date mode" it says

<normal-state> ;                Prefix Command

1. When you grep for dired-mode-map you find this file:

 ~/.emacs.d/elpa/evil- 20150706.711/evil-integration.el 

where this section seems to be important (lines 110 - 120)

(eval-after-load 'dired
  '(progn
     ;; use the standard Dired bindings as a base
     (defvar dired-mode-map)
     (evil-make-overriding-map dired-mode-map 'normal)
     (evil-add-hjkl-bindings dired-mode-map 'normal
       "J" 'dired-goto-file                   ; "j"
       "K" 'dired-do-kill-lines               ; "k"
       "r" 'dired-do-redisplay                ; "l"
       ;; ":d", ":v", ":s", ":e"
       ";" (lookup-key dired-mode-map ":"))))

It seems like ":" is remapped to ";" to free ":" as evil-ex key. In my case, this shadows assigned evil-ex to ";"!

What I have tried so far

I tried to check the value of dotspacemacs-command-key in the evil-integration.el file and run the ";" reassignment only if dotspacemacs-command-key is ":". But it seems that when this file is loaded, dotspacemacs-command-key is always ":", no matter what I set it to in my .spacemacs file?

I could probably just set a dired-hook to re-assign ";" to evil-ex (I will try this next), but I think many people coming from vim are used to swapping ";" and ":", so this may be an issue worth fixing!

Thanks a lot!! I hope I can solve the next one on my own and contribute to this awesome project!

[stephenkraemer]

I am becoming more and more enthusiastic about the possibilities of dired, but in the process, I find that also other key bindings don't work, e.g.

• Use "," instead of SPC m
• Use ", ," instead of C-c C-c

To give an example where correct keybindings would be very helpful

1. I am using wdired mode. Because I use it often, I want to call it with ", w"
2. To leave wdired mode, C-c C-C has to be pressed - ", , " would be better!

If anyone could integrate dired better into Evil/Spacemacs, I would be very grateful!!

[TheBB]

There's been no action here for over a year. The support for dotspacemacs-command-key has been removed in develop (doesn't do ex any more). Therefore I am closing this now as wontfix. Note I was able to get ; to work in dired quite simply with

(evil-define-key 'normal dired-mode-map ";" 'evil-ex)

so this should be simple to do in user config.