4 ms·

As a long time vim user and lover of the idea of vim. emacs is better at being a vim than vim is. (org, magit, helm, swoop, and all the other great packages are

As a long time vim user and lover of the idea of vim. emacs is better at being a vim than vim is. (org, magit, helm, swoop, and all the other great packages are a bonus and work as well as they do because of the way emacs was created.) vim modal editing is life but vim's implementation is really bad comparatively.

habibalamin 9y ago
Which modal editing implementation would you suggest for Emacs?
- monsieurbanana 9y ago
  There's no really much choice here if you want to have VIM modal editing in emacs: you need to use Evil. The question is rather, - do you want to start an emacs config from scratch (then you install and configure whatever plugins you want, including Evil) - or go for one of the community managed ones? The most popular being spacemacs[1], but there's also doom-emacs[2], both are geared towards people that come from VIM and/or want to use VIM-like editing in emacs [1] http://spacemacs.org/ http://spacemacs.org/ [2] https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs
- weaksauce 9y ago
  I personally use spacemacs with a bunch of layers enabled. It uses evil mode for vim emulation.
falcolas 9y ago
I have to disagree. Evil mode in emacs is (on the scale of vim clones) pretty good, but it is still an emulation of vim within emacs, and there are a lot of hard stops throughout the experience for a long time vim user. The biggest hard stop for me was the implementation of C-[, which interpreted word boundaries differently than vim - differently than emacs even. Of course, if all you're looking for is modal editing in emacs and don't mind falling back to emacs keybinds, then evil mode will do just fine for you.
- arnsholt 9y ago
  I had a similar issue when I had to work in Emacs too. Evil is, on the whole a good emulation, but I kept tripping over ^W not doing what I expected. And then if I messed up the undoing, I got to screw around with Emacs' redo functionality being... idiosyncratic.
- weaksauce 9y ago
  You can change word boundaries pretty easily though. There is a little bit of friction in some things like that but nothing that is insurmountable. Every single keystroke is a function that can be changed and even wrapped with "advice" to leave the function alone but change the before, after, or both before and after the function is called.

habibalamin 9y ago

Which modal editing implementation would you suggest for Emacs?

monsieurbanana 9y ago
There's no really much choice here if you want to have VIM modal editing in emacs: you need to use Evil. The question is rather, - do you want to start an emacs config from scratch (then you install and configure whatever plugins you want, including Evil) - or go for one of the community managed ones? The most popular being spacemacs[1], but there's also doom-emacs[2], both are geared towards people that come from VIM and/or want to use VIM-like editing in emacs [1] http://spacemacs.org/ http://spacemacs.org/ [2] https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs
weaksauce 9y ago
I personally use spacemacs with a bunch of layers enabled. It uses evil mode for vim emulation.

falcolas 9y ago

I have to disagree. Evil mode in emacs is (on the scale of vim clones) pretty good, but it is still an emulation of vim within emacs, and there are a lot of hard stops throughout the experience for a long time vim user. The biggest hard stop for me was the implementation of C-[, which interpreted word boundaries differently than vim - differently than emacs even. Of course, if all you're looking for is modal editing in emacs and don't mind falling back to emacs keybinds, then evil mode will do just fine for you.

arnsholt 9y ago
I had a similar issue when I had to work in Emacs too. Evil is, on the whole a good emulation, but I kept tripping over ^W not doing what I expected. And then if I messed up the undoing, I got to screw around with Emacs' redo functionality being... idiosyncratic.
weaksauce 9y ago
You can change word boundaries pretty easily though. There is a little bit of friction in some things like that but nothing that is insurmountable. Every single keystroke is a function that can be changed and even wrapped with "advice" to leave the function alone but change the before, after, or both before and after the function is called.