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I started playing with emacs 24 years ago, then spent 20 years as a devoted vim user with a two year work-enforced gap in Eclipse. I tried spacemacs in evil mod

I started playing with emacs 24 years ago, then spent 20 years as a devoted vim user with a two year work-enforced gap in Eclipse. I tried spacemacs in evil mode about four years back and stayed for magit. I tried VSCode a few weeks ago to see what the fuss was about and had my Eclipse PTSD triggered. Magit, mu4e, elfeed, eww, multiterm, restclient.el, tramp, [edit]org-mode![/edit], the list of replacements for bloated "native"- and surveilling web-apps keeps growing. I mentor an up-and-coming developer who has learned more– about git, the filesystem, shells –in four weeks of using spacemacs than the 23 months of using Atom and VSCode. I know emacs in evil mode makes me smarter and more productive, and I'm seeing anecdotal corroborating evidence in my community.

Tagore 8y ago
There's an old joke: "Emacs is a great OS, but it lacks a decent text editor." Only vi users are allowed to tell that joke with a straight face, IMHO. Evil-mode solves that, and just as magit is better than git evil-mode seems, to me, better than vi. Emacs is better than ever (though you do need to use auto-formatting for languages like JS that change a lot- there is no emacs mode that has kept up with ES whatever. Luckily emacs makes it easy to use formatters like prettier on a per-buffer basis.)
- brlewis 8y ago
  Tide works well with typescript, which I find better than ES whatever.
- kenbolton 8y ago
  > "Emacs is a great OS, but it lacks a decent text editor." > Only vi users are allowed to tell that joke with a straight > face, IMHO. Emacs users can tell that joke, but they have deliver it with a wry smile. Evil-mode users can tell that joke with a knowing laugh.
YetAnotherNick 8y ago
I am using vim for years now, and I haven't written more than 50 lines of vimscript apart from the bundles. Most of the thing that I have written is just maps, some configuration for other bundles, and some copied better defaults. I still don't get it when people say they heavily use elisp. Can anyone give example of a highly custom thing that you do in emacs/vim/any other editor, for which there is no famous bundle available.
- dangom 8y ago
  I'm using Org Mode to write my thesis and, although most of the functionality I use comes from vanilla org mode, I do need to write some Elisp to get the LaTeX export working properly, and to knit different projects together into a single one. As another example, it took me less than 30 lines of Elisp to get Apple Music incremental searching from within Emacs. A highly custom thing that I don't get elsewhere.
- xfer 8y ago
  I occasionally use elisp while replacing with regex(you can do computation on captured strings), can you do this in vim?
  - YetAnotherNick 8y ago
    Yes, select in visual mode type :! and it gets processed by a unix command.
- kenbolton 8y ago
  The question is not elisp v. vimscript but rather the power of not having to switch contexts. To write code for a locally-hosted RESTful API I used Chrome to read the API docs, Postman to make the calls, iTerm2 to start/restart the server and read the logs, and a text editor to make changes. I replaced that flow with eww, restclient.el (amazing!), multiterm, and an editor buffer. No changing of context, conserve about ~1GB RAM in Chrome instances, full-screen if I want it, and everything is text (I'm looking at you, Postman). On the "highly custom" level, I have a work-in-progress script that takes a URL, sends it to a Splash server, and returns the rendered HTML to eww for viewing. This is great for annoying SPAs like the article that spawned this conversation. My current goal is to swap out my development MBP with an eInk tablet and bluetooth keyboard. Success will be measured as a function of productivity and weather-/water-/environment-proofing of the device; the goal is productivity in full sunlight and/or under water. Emacs will have a central role in that. Just need to find an eInk device with adequate screen refresh rate and Bluetooth support....
  - figgis 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

Tagore 8y ago

There's an old joke: "Emacs is a great OS, but it lacks a decent text editor." Only vi users are allowed to tell that joke with a straight face, IMHO. Evil-mode solves that, and just as magit is better than git evil-mode seems, to me, better than vi. Emacs is better than ever (though you do need to use auto-formatting for languages like JS that change a lot- there is no emacs mode that has kept up with ES whatever. Luckily emacs makes it easy to use formatters like prettier on a per-buffer basis.)

brlewis 8y ago
Tide works well with typescript, which I find better than ES whatever.
kenbolton 8y ago
> "Emacs is a great OS, but it lacks a decent text editor." > Only vi users are allowed to tell that joke with a straight > face, IMHO. Emacs users can tell that joke, but they have deliver it with a wry smile. Evil-mode users can tell that joke with a knowing laugh.

YetAnotherNick 8y ago

I am using vim for years now, and I haven't written more than 50 lines of vimscript apart from the bundles. Most of the thing that I have written is just maps, some configuration for other bundles, and some copied better defaults. I still don't get it when people say they heavily use elisp. Can anyone give example of a highly custom thing that you do in emacs/vim/any other editor, for which there is no famous bundle available.

dangom 8y ago
I'm using Org Mode to write my thesis and, although most of the functionality I use comes from vanilla org mode, I do need to write some Elisp to get the LaTeX export working properly, and to knit different projects together into a single one. As another example, it took me less than 30 lines of Elisp to get Apple Music incremental searching from within Emacs. A highly custom thing that I don't get elsewhere.
xfer 8y ago
I occasionally use elisp while replacing with regex(you can do computation on captured strings), can you do this in vim?
- YetAnotherNick 8y ago
  Yes, select in visual mode type :! and it gets processed by a unix command.
kenbolton 8y ago
The question is not elisp v. vimscript but rather the power of not having to switch contexts. To write code for a locally-hosted RESTful API I used Chrome to read the API docs, Postman to make the calls, iTerm2 to start/restart the server and read the logs, and a text editor to make changes. I replaced that flow with eww, restclient.el (amazing!), multiterm, and an editor buffer. No changing of context, conserve about ~1GB RAM in Chrome instances, full-screen if I want it, and everything is text (I'm looking at you, Postman). On the "highly custom" level, I have a work-in-progress script that takes a URL, sends it to a Splash server, and returns the rendered HTML to eww for viewing. This is great for annoying SPAs like the article that spawned this conversation. My current goal is to swap out my development MBP with an eInk tablet and bluetooth keyboard. Success will be measured as a function of productivity and weather-/water-/environment-proofing of the device; the goal is productivity in full sunlight and/or under water. Emacs will have a central role in that. Just need to find an eInk device with adequate screen refresh rate and Bluetooth support....
- figgis 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]