I'm a relatively new user to emacs, having just come over from many years of using vim. I'm mostly thrilled with evil mode and emacs in general, but there are a few annoyances still lingering. One of them has to do with the caret character (i.e. this: ^). In vim and evil mode (and most of unix), the caret means "beginning of line", and typing it gets you to the beginning of the line. However, in Emacs, whenever i type a caret, it waits for me to type another character before deciding what to do, because the caret can be used as a circumflex (i.e. to type a lot of French words like "Hôtel", you would first type the caret, then your letter, and they would be smooshed together to form the right glyph).
That is, when I'm in evil mode (in "normal" state), and type the caret, it actually inserts an underlined caret character in the document temporarily, waiting for me to respond. If i don't type an alphabetic character (but instead press something like space or enter), the caret disappears and I'm taken to the beginning of the line. This might sound like a small thing, but it's supremely annoying, and I wish to be rid of this behaviour.
To be clear, the caret also works exactly like this in every other single program on my mac, except for one, which is MacVim. In MacVim, the caret instantly takes me to the beginning of the line (only in the GUI though, in the terminal it doesn't work).
I know I can rebind the motion to some other key, but I'd really rather not. I'd just like this annoying behaviour to go away.
I'm using Mac OS X, and I have a Swedish keyboard with Swedish keyboard layout.
emacs -Q)?^keypress, and then doing something with it before passing it on to the program. Which means you have to fix it at the OS level, since Emacs isn't going to know you've pressed the^key at all.^ <SPC>and pressC-h l(view-lossage). If caret and space do not have separate entries there you are out of luck. Emacs shows there what it reads as keystrokes from the input device.