key chords in isearch

Question

I really love key-chord.el. It's become an integral part of my workflow, but sometimes I wish I could have them in the minibuffer (for things like evil-search). Specifically, I'd like jj to exit out of evil-search and move down a line. Is this possible?

I know I can hack together a command that acts as both a prefix and a command (see this SO question), so I could bind j to a self inserting command, and jj to my special command. How would I be able to break the event loop after a specified idle time? I do type jj once in a blue moon, and I'd still like the flexibility of a timeout.

Is there any other way which I am unaware of to achieve what I want?

EDIT:

Origionally, this question was about the minibuffer in general. key-chord.el seems to work fine with minibuffer-local-map. It does not, however, work with isearch-mode-map. Binding a command to a single regular key like j does work in isearch. This is what I'm trying to solve.

Answer 1

I have found a solution which manually reproduces the behaviour of key-chord.el.

(defun isearch-exit-chord-worker (&optional arg)
  (interactive "p")
  (execute-kbd-macro (kbd "<backspace> <return>")))

(defun isearch-exit-chord (arg)
  (interactive "p")
  (isearch-printing-char)
  (unless (fboundp 'smartrep-read-event-loop)
    (require 'smartrep))
  (run-at-time 0.3 nil 'keyboard-quit)
  (condition-case e
    (smartrep-read-event-loop
      '(("j" . isearch-exit-chord-worker)
         ("k" . isearch-exit-chord-worker)))
    (quit nil)))

;; example bindings
(define-key isearch-mode-map "j" 'isearch-exit-chord)
(define-key isearch-mode-map "k" 'isearch-exit-chord)

This approach actually has several advantages over key-chord.el.

• It does not use an input method, so you can use a different input method in conjunction with this.
• The first character is shown immediately, and retracted if it is incorrect, while key-chord.el only shows it after a delay.

Answer 2

I have found this to be useful:

(defun isearch-enable-key-chord ()
  (key-chord-mode 1)
  (key-chord-define isearch-mode-map "jj" 'isearch-cancel))
(add-hook 'isearch-mode-hook 'isearch-enable-key-chord)