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I think for both Vim and Emacs the decision comes down to this: Do you intend to invest in your editor? Not only in the sense of investing time to learn their i

I think for both Vim and Emacs the decision comes down to this: Do you intend to invest in your editor? Not only in the sense of investing time to learn their idioms and acquire some basic muscle memory, but also to configure it to your liking. Both Emacs and Vim are usable in the default state, but there's much much more you can get out of them. As opposed to most IDEs, which usually have one proper way to use them, both Vim and Emacs thrive on configurability. On the flip side, that means that you're going to spend time setting up and maintaining your config. If that's not something you can endure (or even enjoy), you might want to leave it be. As far as I can tell, that's also the main reason both are often overlooked in CS classes: The goal of most professors teaching programming is to actually teach you a language, not explain an editor for a couple of weeks.

skinnymuch 9y ago
Isn't the initial learning curve the biggest time suck? I don't know either besides some basic vim commands. But seems like learning vim to the point of it being second nature would take up the majority of time.
- btschaegg 9y ago
  That's one way of seeing it. You'll have to keep in mind, though, that you don't need to learn hundreds of Vim commands to be as productive in writing text as before - that's actually rather easy to achieve. So, for me, it doesn't seem like a timesink that much because anything past that point will speed you up. Hacking around in my Emacs config (I'm an Evil user) on the other hand does eat up time. I don't know if it wouldn't be as bad if I wasn't annyed with minor things not working exactly how I want them to, though. Edit: I'd also say that Vim bindings are something where "learning by doing" is the best way to get going, and I'd assume the same applies to Emacs hotkeys. If you want to use them effectively, you'll want to develop muscle memory for the most common actions, so they are a great thing to pick up while you're actually working on stuff.
  - skinnymuch 9y ago
    Sorry for the late reply. But thanks for your response.

skinnymuch 9y ago

Isn't the initial learning curve the biggest time suck? I don't know either besides some basic vim commands. But seems like learning vim to the point of it being second nature would take up the majority of time.

btschaegg 9y ago
That's one way of seeing it. You'll have to keep in mind, though, that you don't need to learn hundreds of Vim commands to be as productive in writing text as before - that's actually rather easy to achieve. So, for me, it doesn't seem like a timesink that much because anything past that point will speed you up. Hacking around in my Emacs config (I'm an Evil user) on the other hand does eat up time. I don't know if it wouldn't be as bad if I wasn't annyed with minor things not working exactly how I want them to, though. Edit: I'd also say that Vim bindings are something where "learning by doing" is the best way to get going, and I'd assume the same applies to Emacs hotkeys. If you want to use them effectively, you'll want to develop muscle memory for the most common actions, so they are a great thing to pick up while you're actually working on stuff.
- skinnymuch 9y ago
  Sorry for the late reply. But thanks for your response.