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Tried to switch to vim/Emacs repeatedly for more than 10 years, never understood the reason of cryptic commands and shortcuts, that was OK 25 years ago, but sin
by atemerev 11y ago
Tried to switch to vim/Emacs repeatedly for more than 10 years, never understood the reason of cryptic commands and shortcuts, that was OK 25 years ago, but since then, keyboards got, say, _arrow keys_. Alt-F is "forward one word"? OK, can be memorized, but there is Alt-right arrow for everything else, much more intuitive.
UI matters. Shortcuts and their relationships are part of the UI, and it's horrible for Emacs. It's the same as some people saying "syntax doesn't matter in programming languages", to which I say BS.
- chm 11y agoVim and Emacs are two different beasts. My personal setup is using Spacemacs, after having my own clumsy customization on both Vim and Emacs. So now I use Emacs with Vim keybindings. Spacemacs has been suggested many many times in similar threads. I also suggest you give it a try, as its keybindings are very user friendly and documentation is good. And per your specific example: Vim has a great system to move around text. You just need to get used to it, but basically, you'll be executing "motions", where you're telling the software exactly what you want to do using very few keypresses. Anything can look cryptic if you don't take the time to learn it! Trust us, it's worth your while! You are truly limiting yourself by only using arrow keys. You'll quickly stop using them at all in Vim, while gaining productivity quickly. And if you don't like Vim per se, some software supports Vim keybindings.
- atemerev 11y agoI tried repeatedly for many years and still couldn't adapt. And I easily adapted to, say, blind typing.
- chm 11y agoThen try again with Spacemacs. It's basically just a distribution of Emacs that comes preconfigured. I didn't even want to learn the Emacs bindings after using Vim, but this is a non-problem in Spacemacs. Just add the plugins you need to your config file, and voilà. I'm sure you could like it.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- amasad 11y agoArrow keys are the worst ergonomically. You need to be able to stay as close as possible to the home position. When my RSI got really bad I noticed how bad it can be to keep reaching for the arrow keys.
- atemerev 11y agoI don't feel uncomfortable when reaching for the arrow keys with my right hand. But I _do_ feel very uncomfortable when I press wrong navigation key in Vim (was it h or j? My fingers don't _feel_ it), and it's really uncomfortable reaching for Ctrl for anything in Emacs, especially Ctrl-B — now _this_ is RSI-prone).
- dragandj 11y agoThat's why you could remap ctrl and put it just next to SPACE. Speaking of that, I also remapped Shift to space, and now I use space for both shift and space (sounds crazy, but it is ergonomically perfect!).
- amasad 11y agoTrue, emacs default key binding is also RSI-prone. I suggested going with vim's key binding (evil-mode, spcemacs) for newcomers. But I don't buy the argument that they're so hard to learn, consider it a new video game controller.
- wtbob 11y agoMy emacs binds the arrow keys to move by character and alt+arrow to move by word. But M-f, C-f, C-M-f (and ditto for -b, -n & -p) are a pretty powerful command language for dealing with text & code. You're right that syntax matters: and emacs has a very nice syntax for dealing with text & code. vi is probably better, but I like emacs and am used to it, so I don't bother with spacemacs. CUA bindings are … not good.