7 ms·

I enjoyed this; I moved from Vim to Emacs a couple of years ago and indeed the most important thing to recognise is this: Emacs does have a great text editor,

I enjoyed this; I moved from Vim to Emacs a couple of years ago and indeed the most important thing to recognise is this: Emacs does have a great text editor, and it's Vim! With evil-mode you can use all the Vim bindings you're used to (including sed commands with ':'), but with the added benefits (and drawbacks) of Emacs! I've also found that fiddling with my .emacs is really fun, fiddling with .vimrc was usually quite frustrating.

dorfsmay 11y ago
I tried this, but found that the issue is that most major modes use a "grammar" that make sense to native-emacs user, and ended up fighting with them.
- massysett 11y ago
  After a day of editing on Emacs on a MacBook Pro, my hands felt like they were going to shrink and stick into a contorted state. So I tried Evil which does work fairly well for editing text. In some ways it's better than Vim--the :substitute is really nice as it shows all pending substitutions in the buffer. But as you said, some major modes work with Evil and others don't, so I'm never sure what I'm going to get. Ironically a modern laptop is well-suited for Vim, as vi worked on primitive terminals--laptop keyboards don't have a lot of keys and they are poorly positioned. The MIT lab for Emacs probably had nice keyboards. So these days I am back to Vim and have been finding plugins to make up for the things that Emacs has that Vim doesn't. vim-dispatch is a decent replacement for M-x compile.
  - TYPE_FASTER 11y ago
    Reconfiguring OS X to substitute control for caps lock really helped me. Yes, many keyboards had them swapped physically some time ago. Here's an example of a keyboard from a Sun workstation: http://xahlee.info/kbd/i/kb/sun_keyboard_left.jpg http://xahlee.info/kbd/i/kb/sun_keyboard_left.jpg
  - greenyouse 11y ago
    I had this problem a few years ago when I switched from Vim to Emacs. You could try writing your own evil-leader shortcuts for common commands + major mode commands. It initially takes a day or two to set up basic commands (like buffer switching, commands for your favourite programming language, and REPL stuff) but after that there's minimal tweaking to do. For less commonly used commands you usually can do M-x [command-name] or just memorize a random Emacs keybinding. In the end I thought it was 100% worth it for working in LISP dialects like Clojure, Scheme, and Common LISP. The good REPL integration and the ability to control everything makes Emacs pretty fun.
  - unimpressive 11y ago
    >The MIT lab for Emacs probably had nice keyboards. Oh you have no idea... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_cadet_keyboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_cadet_keyboard
    - rav 11y ago
      Following the links in that article, you find the ADM-3A that inspired the reliance of Vim on the Escape key: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KB_Terminal_ADM3A.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KB_Terminal_ADM3A.svg
    - edoloughlin 11y ago
      It was so ahead of its time, it even had Like and Dislike keys on the RHS!
      - aldanor 11y ago
        The LIKE key... priceless :)
  - dragandj 11y ago
    But you can reconfigure your keyboard however you like it. Try recommendataions from Ergonomic Emacs.
- tetheno 11y ago
  Yes, that's a problem. I actually have redefined all they keybindings of certain major modes so they play nicely with evil.
- pmoriarty 11y ago
  I used vim for 20 years before switching to emacs. I'd actually tried switching twice. Firt time with viper (I think), which didn't have good enough vim emulation. Second time evil-mode finally convinced me to switch completely. Then I ran in to the same issue as you, that a lot of emacs modes had native emacs keybindings. So what I wound up doing was re-binding those to be more vim-like. I didn't rebind everything, just the things I most used, and it's worked great for me. I'm still a happy emacs user. It did help that I already knew lisp and scheme, so getting up to speed with elisp was relatively painless. And it helped a lot that at the time I made the switch I was out of work and had a ton of free time on my hands. Don't think I would have been able to do it without that time, as it did take a ton of time to customize emacs enough to compete with the vim setup I had cobbled togather over 20 years. It was totally worth it for me. But I'm not sure I'd recommend it to every veteran vim user, unless they have lots of time on their hands. On the other hand, I've heard that Spacemacs has a lot of sane defaults for vim users. So maybe Spacemacs+evil is the answer. I haven't tried it myself yet, since I have a ton of custom vim bindings of my own in emacs now, and very little free time to experiment these days.
  - kqr 11y ago
    You're absolutely right that it takes a bunch of time to set Emacs up initially. I took a week off work for unrelated reasons and spent a few evenings of that time to set up Emacs with evil-mode and it was totally worth it. However, I did put off doing it for over a year before that, because I didn't have the time to spend. An important realisation was that I only need my Emacs to do the basic Vim things and then some extensions I commonly use. At that point, I can survive using only Emacs and building onto it as I feel like I need something.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- ExceptionRaised 11y ago
  Take a look at spacemacs (sorry, no link, I'm on mobile). It's got a lot of cool features, but most importantly the "layers" (an abstraction on top of modes and packages) all have evil-ified keybindings.

dorfsmay 11y ago

I tried this, but found that the issue is that most major modes use a "grammar" that make sense to native-emacs user, and ended up fighting with them.

massysett 11y ago
After a day of editing on Emacs on a MacBook Pro, my hands felt like they were going to shrink and stick into a contorted state. So I tried Evil which does work fairly well for editing text. In some ways it's better than Vim--the :substitute is really nice as it shows all pending substitutions in the buffer. But as you said, some major modes work with Evil and others don't, so I'm never sure what I'm going to get. Ironically a modern laptop is well-suited for Vim, as vi worked on primitive terminals--laptop keyboards don't have a lot of keys and they are poorly positioned. The MIT lab for Emacs probably had nice keyboards. So these days I am back to Vim and have been finding plugins to make up for the things that Emacs has that Vim doesn't. vim-dispatch is a decent replacement for M-x compile.
- TYPE_FASTER 11y ago
  Reconfiguring OS X to substitute control for caps lock really helped me. Yes, many keyboards had them swapped physically some time ago. Here's an example of a keyboard from a Sun workstation: http://xahlee.info/kbd/i/kb/sun_keyboard_left.jpg http://xahlee.info/kbd/i/kb/sun_keyboard_left.jpg
- greenyouse 11y ago
  I had this problem a few years ago when I switched from Vim to Emacs. You could try writing your own evil-leader shortcuts for common commands + major mode commands. It initially takes a day or two to set up basic commands (like buffer switching, commands for your favourite programming language, and REPL stuff) but after that there's minimal tweaking to do. For less commonly used commands you usually can do M-x [command-name] or just memorize a random Emacs keybinding. In the end I thought it was 100% worth it for working in LISP dialects like Clojure, Scheme, and Common LISP. The good REPL integration and the ability to control everything makes Emacs pretty fun.
- unimpressive 11y ago
  >The MIT lab for Emacs probably had nice keyboards. Oh you have no idea... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_cadet_keyboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_cadet_keyboard
  - rav 11y ago
    Following the links in that article, you find the ADM-3A that inspired the reliance of Vim on the Escape key: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KB_Terminal_ADM3A.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KB_Terminal_ADM3A.svg
  - edoloughlin 11y ago
    It was so ahead of its time, it even had Like and Dislike keys on the RHS!
    - aldanor 11y ago
      The LIKE key... priceless :)
- dragandj 11y ago
  But you can reconfigure your keyboard however you like it. Try recommendataions from Ergonomic Emacs.
tetheno 11y ago
Yes, that's a problem. I actually have redefined all they keybindings of certain major modes so they play nicely with evil.
pmoriarty 11y ago
I used vim for 20 years before switching to emacs. I'd actually tried switching twice. Firt time with viper (I think), which didn't have good enough vim emulation. Second time evil-mode finally convinced me to switch completely. Then I ran in to the same issue as you, that a lot of emacs modes had native emacs keybindings. So what I wound up doing was re-binding those to be more vim-like. I didn't rebind everything, just the things I most used, and it's worked great for me. I'm still a happy emacs user. It did help that I already knew lisp and scheme, so getting up to speed with elisp was relatively painless. And it helped a lot that at the time I made the switch I was out of work and had a ton of free time on my hands. Don't think I would have been able to do it without that time, as it did take a ton of time to customize emacs enough to compete with the vim setup I had cobbled togather over 20 years. It was totally worth it for me. But I'm not sure I'd recommend it to every veteran vim user, unless they have lots of time on their hands. On the other hand, I've heard that Spacemacs has a lot of sane defaults for vim users. So maybe Spacemacs+evil is the answer. I haven't tried it myself yet, since I have a ton of custom vim bindings of my own in emacs now, and very little free time to experiment these days.
- kqr 11y ago
  You're absolutely right that it takes a bunch of time to set Emacs up initially. I took a week off work for unrelated reasons and spent a few evenings of that time to set up Emacs with evil-mode and it was totally worth it. However, I did put off doing it for over a year before that, because I didn't have the time to spend. An important realisation was that I only need my Emacs to do the basic Vim things and then some extensions I commonly use. At that point, I can survive using only Emacs and building onto it as I feel like I need something.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
ExceptionRaised 11y ago
Take a look at spacemacs (sorry, no link, I'm on mobile). It's got a lot of cool features, but most importantly the "layers" (an abstraction on top of modes and packages) all have evil-ified keybindings.