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Long time emacs user here. I had an aha moment yesterday, when after several months of using God mode I said "I should rebind C-t to generic transpose and use a

by fovc 10y ago

Long time emacs user here. I had an aha moment yesterday, when after several months of using God mode I said "I should rebind C-t to generic transpose and use a follow-up key to specify char, word, sexp, etc." If I understand correctly, this is sort of how VIM works. I want to try EVIL now. Anyone here that's made the switch in this direction and can talk about it?

JackMorgan 10y ago
I switched to Evil mode and after a year I love it. I wrote the book to help me learn more about it!
mikekchar 10y ago
I used emacs for 20 years. Around about 2007 I started doing all of my development on a tiny netbook and emacs was using too much memory. I switched to vim. It took me a good year to get used to it, but now I'm hooked on that way of thinking. About a year ago I switched back to emacs with evil mode. It is close enough to vim that I can barely tell the difference. If you are already familiar with emacs and have a setup that works for you, then switching to evil should be less painful than someone switching from vim. I think the biggest thing to accept is that you will not be proficient with your editor for quite a long time. I recommend practicing with vim tutorials until it feels reasonably good before taking the plunge entirely. One very important thing is to keep looking for efficient ways to work with it. It's a bit like emacs in that if you ever think, "Oh, this is just painful. There must be a better way", then there is almost guaranteed to be a better way. Stop, find out what it is. Practice it. My last piece of advice is that vim-style editing is a little bit different that emacs-style editing (at least for me). With emacs, I find that I memorise keybindings and practice using them. With vim, it's much more about the context -- when you are in situation X, you do this kind of thing. So it needs more practice (again IMO). However, once you have your brain oriented (orientated? :-) ), there is this sense of freedom. You are working with larger blocks of abstraction, rather than just the character level. Some people feel this is more efficient (i.e. faster), but I'm not sure. For me it's rather that it is closer to what I'm actually thinking when I'm programming. YMMV and I should warn you again that it takes considerable practice to get to the point where it starts to feel good.

by fovc 10y ago

JackMorgan 10y ago

I switched to Evil mode and after a year I love it. I wrote the book to help me learn more about it!

mikekchar 10y ago

I used emacs for 20 years. Around about 2007 I started doing all of my development on a tiny netbook and emacs was using too much memory. I switched to vim. It took me a good year to get used to it, but now I'm hooked on that way of thinking. About a year ago I switched back to emacs with evil mode. It is close enough to vim that I can barely tell the difference. If you are already familiar with emacs and have a setup that works for you, then switching to evil should be less painful than someone switching from vim. I think the biggest thing to accept is that you will not be proficient with your editor for quite a long time. I recommend practicing with vim tutorials until it feels reasonably good before taking the plunge entirely. One very important thing is to keep looking for efficient ways to work with it. It's a bit like emacs in that if you ever think, "Oh, this is just painful. There must be a better way", then there is almost guaranteed to be a better way. Stop, find out what it is. Practice it. My last piece of advice is that vim-style editing is a little bit different that emacs-style editing (at least for me). With emacs, I find that I memorise keybindings and practice using them. With vim, it's much more about the context -- when you are in situation X, you do this kind of thing. So it needs more practice (again IMO). However, once you have your brain oriented (orientated? :-) ), there is this sense of freedom. You are working with larger blocks of abstraction, rather than just the character level. Some people feel this is more efficient (i.e. faster), but I'm not sure. For me it's rather that it is closer to what I'm actually thinking when I'm programming. YMMV and I should warn you again that it takes considerable practice to get to the point where it starts to feel good.