I specifically avoided making that ; and : swap for decades as tempting as it has always been. Repeating with ; is just too useful.
However, I'm using Doom Emacs these days (with evil, of course) and while it emulates vim's command mode with colon, it's designed to drive most "commands" with space as a sort of leader key. I could imagine space being a nice remap for : in vanilla vim since it does nothing in normal mode.
I use both vim and doom-emacs almost daily and jump between the two. I like using <spacebar> to call command mode in vim to do things like :tabe or :bd or
:ls etc. (I have <leader> set to , ). I have this remap in my .vimrc > cmap w<space> :w<cr>. This allows <space>w<space> to write the buffer. The second
space acts as <cr> meaning I don't need to press <enter>. Lovely.
Now, turning to doom-emacs, SPACE is the modal for getting the list of next available commands. To save a buffer in doom-emacs I use SPACE w SPACE. Et
voila, the same muscle memory works for both. BTW I also set up :ww to write/quit so SPACE W W does this in both editors. Well, it works for me!
That sounds great! It actually only dawned on me that I could have a setup like you describe as I was writing my comment above. Thanks for sharing your details!
The only downside for me, and I've been reluctant about this for years, is I ssh into a lot of Linux machines that usually just have the standard stuff and default configs. This has kept me from experimenting with a lot things so as to keep my muscle memory also standard (thus avoiding i.e.: zsh, extensive .vimrc with plugins, etc).
However, I'm using Doom Emacs these days (with evil, of course) and while it emulates vim's command mode with colon, it's designed to drive most "commands" with space as a sort of leader key. I could imagine space being a nice remap for : in vanilla vim since it does nothing in normal mode.