4 ms·

>But you know, I can't hang Emacs and Vim on the wall and leave them there. I never got the hang of Emacs, but there is a decent vim extension (there are a bun

by divbit 10y ago

>But you know, I can't hang Emacs and Vim on the wall and leave them there. I never got the hang of Emacs, but there is a decent vim extension (there are a bunch) called vimStyle which at least gets you the vim-like code navigation.

Philipp__ 10y ago
I had really hard time for 3 months (after using vim for 4 years). I just uninstalled everything else, and first week was painful, but it was really fun since I wanted to learn Lisp/Scheme, so I touched ELisp while playing/tweaking with emacs. After that I just couldn't go back to Vim. I started tweaking and digging. The point of Emacs is that you can make it be whatever you want. It can be both amazingly ugly and beautiful, minimal or heavy like an OS. In the end, what kept me on Emacs to be sincere was auto indentation and perfect completion system. I always had to tweak and fix those things in Vim. In Emacs, nothing, I just write code (yeah, navigating code in Vim is faster, but Emacs has some really neat ides like rectangles).
- Scarbutt 10y ago
  Since you used vim for 4 years, why didn't you add evil to emacs?
  - sigzero 10y ago
    It's not the same. Close but no.
  - Philipp__ 10y ago
    Good question. I dare to say EVIL is best Vim alternative. It's 98% percent there. But it felt wrong using Vim in Emacs. Then I wasn't using Vim nor Emacs, because I would mix commands from both (sometimes I would use C-s sometimes /?). So I told myself, if I felt comfortable using Vim, then why don't I try and learn Emacs so I can be comfortable in it too? And now after 6 months in Emacs I got to that standard productivity point in terms of navigating and chunking out the code. But the best aspect of Emacs for me personaly is, I want to do something with text, I just select it, press M-x, enter the word(noun,verb of thing I want to do with it) press TAB, see list of available commands and voila! It amazes me how many options there are in Emacs! Wonderful really!
    - james-mcelwain 10y ago
      I feel you... I use some unholy abomination of Emacs, Vim, and Spacemacs. Sometimes based on convenience, but mostly based on what I learned first.
    - saltycraig 10y ago
      Using Helm is a joy, you will be able to find commands much easier than the vanilla Emacs completion system. Give it a try, I consider it essential now, and the fuzzy matching saves me daily.
- barrkel 10y ago
  Hmm. Emacs' indentation is one of the things I've had to fight hardest. It's extremely opinionated, and it's almost always wrong for each new language I teach it about, and it took a lot of convincing to indent C and Java the way I want. The way it defaulted to using smart fill (i.e. use indent div 8 tabs followed by indent mod 8 spaces), so that indentation had this mix of indent and spaces, gah. It's bad enough that I wrote my own plain non-smart auto-indent (just replicate indent of previous line) to get by in modes I couldn't convince to be sane. The fact that there is no real unification for your preferred indentation step is really telling. I have a big block configuring c-basic-offset, js-indent-level, css-indent-offset, etc. - a big random bag of different variables that affect different subsets of language modes, depending on their lineage.
  - james-mcelwain 10y ago
    I use Emacs for languages I work continuously in and have strong (or am forming) opinions about. Willing to invest 1-2 hrs configuring. Save it in a git repo. Not everyone share's preferences (tabs, spaces, etc.) across languages. Maybe I'm crazy but I use 2 vs 4 in different languages. If I'm just trying a language out for the first time, I find it much easier to use vscode + vim plugin + language plugin to try something out.
    - eyko 10y ago
      But then you have to update your settings every time you collaborate on a different project with different opinions about indenting. The right way would be for emacs to simply respect the project's .editorconfig file like any other editor does, but I can't for the life of me make emacs open JavaScript files and set up indentation properly with editorconfig. It totally defeats the purpose...
- saltycraig 10y ago
  Pretty much the same story here. Used Vim for years and even read a couple of the books out there on it, but I was always running into annoying little issues that drove to me to try Emacs. I stuck with Emacs for probably 2 months and ran back to Vim because I just didn't dive into it (learning elisp is crucial!). Fast forward maybe a year and I was ready to give Emacs another try. Once I overcame the initial hump, I was sold on Emacs. I still enjoy the Vi/m keybindings and use them in Firefox or the odd time I use Sublime. I haven't found anything close in Emacs to the concept of word-objects like in Vim: nothing beats the ease of doing "ci(", but I'll live without it.
justavoice 10y ago
Took me a while, but finally got the hang of it.

by divbit 10y ago

Philipp__ 10y ago

I had really hard time for 3 months (after using vim for 4 years). I just uninstalled everything else, and first week was painful, but it was really fun since I wanted to learn Lisp/Scheme, so I touched ELisp while playing/tweaking with emacs. After that I just couldn't go back to Vim. I started tweaking and digging. The point of Emacs is that you can make it be whatever you want. It can be both amazingly ugly and beautiful, minimal or heavy like an OS. In the end, what kept me on Emacs to be sincere was auto indentation and perfect completion system. I always had to tweak and fix those things in Vim. In Emacs, nothing, I just write code (yeah, navigating code in Vim is faster, but Emacs has some really neat ides like rectangles).

Scarbutt 10y ago
Since you used vim for 4 years, why didn't you add evil to emacs?
- sigzero 10y ago
  It's not the same. Close but no.
- Philipp__ 10y ago
  Good question. I dare to say EVIL is best Vim alternative. It's 98% percent there. But it felt wrong using Vim in Emacs. Then I wasn't using Vim nor Emacs, because I would mix commands from both (sometimes I would use C-s sometimes /?). So I told myself, if I felt comfortable using Vim, then why don't I try and learn Emacs so I can be comfortable in it too? And now after 6 months in Emacs I got to that standard productivity point in terms of navigating and chunking out the code. But the best aspect of Emacs for me personaly is, I want to do something with text, I just select it, press M-x, enter the word(noun,verb of thing I want to do with it) press TAB, see list of available commands and voila! It amazes me how many options there are in Emacs! Wonderful really!
  - james-mcelwain 10y ago
    I feel you... I use some unholy abomination of Emacs, Vim, and Spacemacs. Sometimes based on convenience, but mostly based on what I learned first.
  - saltycraig 10y ago
    Using Helm is a joy, you will be able to find commands much easier than the vanilla Emacs completion system. Give it a try, I consider it essential now, and the fuzzy matching saves me daily.
barrkel 10y ago
Hmm. Emacs' indentation is one of the things I've had to fight hardest. It's extremely opinionated, and it's almost always wrong for each new language I teach it about, and it took a lot of convincing to indent C and Java the way I want. The way it defaulted to using smart fill (i.e. use indent div 8 tabs followed by indent mod 8 spaces), so that indentation had this mix of indent and spaces, gah. It's bad enough that I wrote my own plain non-smart auto-indent (just replicate indent of previous line) to get by in modes I couldn't convince to be sane. The fact that there is no real unification for your preferred indentation step is really telling. I have a big block configuring c-basic-offset, js-indent-level, css-indent-offset, etc. - a big random bag of different variables that affect different subsets of language modes, depending on their lineage.
- james-mcelwain 10y ago
  I use Emacs for languages I work continuously in and have strong (or am forming) opinions about. Willing to invest 1-2 hrs configuring. Save it in a git repo. Not everyone share's preferences (tabs, spaces, etc.) across languages. Maybe I'm crazy but I use 2 vs 4 in different languages. If I'm just trying a language out for the first time, I find it much easier to use vscode + vim plugin + language plugin to try something out.
  - eyko 10y ago
    But then you have to update your settings every time you collaborate on a different project with different opinions about indenting. The right way would be for emacs to simply respect the project's .editorconfig file like any other editor does, but I can't for the life of me make emacs open JavaScript files and set up indentation properly with editorconfig. It totally defeats the purpose...
saltycraig 10y ago
Pretty much the same story here. Used Vim for years and even read a couple of the books out there on it, but I was always running into annoying little issues that drove to me to try Emacs. I stuck with Emacs for probably 2 months and ran back to Vim because I just didn't dive into it (learning elisp is crucial!). Fast forward maybe a year and I was ready to give Emacs another try. Once I overcame the initial hump, I was sold on Emacs. I still enjoy the Vi/m keybindings and use them in Firefox or the odd time I use Sublime. I haven't found anything close in Emacs to the concept of word-objects like in Vim: nothing beats the ease of doing "ci(", but I'll live without it.

justavoice 10y ago

Took me a while, but finally got the hang of it.