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I guess it's not a vim article unless someone refers to emacs/another editor for no reason. Thanks for the unsubstantial comment. Regardless of editor X, Y, or

I guess it's not a vim article unless someone refers to emacs/another editor for no reason. Thanks for the unsubstantial comment. Regardless of editor X, Y, or Z, this article is about a feature Vim received. I for one find it useful since, well, I use vim.

zeveb 7y ago
> Thanks for the unsubstantial comment. Given that for decades a primary draw for vi was that it was simple, the fact that people keep adding features to it until it's approaching where Emacs was a few decades ago is noteworthy. Noting that Emacs has had a certain feature for decades, and that the feature has been receiving bug fixes and adding still more sub-features is substantial. Given that users of vim no longer seem to care about simplicity, one has to wonder: why stick with vim? Emacs has a far better extension language (elisp is to vimscript as a thermonuclear weapon is to a sharp stick), evil-mode can accurately replicate the vim editing experience, and Emacs has far more features and packages now than does vim. It's a bit like preferring a race car to a van because you want speed, but then deciding you want to haul packages for a living and bolting on a 2-ton flatbed to the back of your race car. You end up wasting fuel and still not carrying as many packages as you could with a good van — and not running as quickly, either.
- mmcgaha 7y ago
  Having features and having features that serve a groups needs at the right time are different things. The first time I fired up emacs was in 1995 on a pentium 66 with 8 MB of RAM. It made my computer grind to a halt so editing text was not going to happen. When I tried vi, it ran like I expected a text editor to run. So here I am today, my fingers long trained up to use vi, and I find little need to learn emacs. Sure emacs has had useful features for years, but the barrier to entry was just too high, and now it is too late to win over folks like me.
  - mruts 7y ago
    But why is it to late? Evil mode works perfectly. I think you would find the transition quite easy.
    - s_c_r 7y ago
      It works fine as a vim emulation layer, but as a full replacement for vim it does no better than other vim emulations, like IdeaVim. For example, in vim I can hit : to open command line mode followed by ctrl + f to open a mini buffer for ex commands that can be manipulated like any other vim buffer. I use this feature all the time in vim and it isn't available in any of the vim emulation software I've tried. Now, I'm sure there are plenty of ways to accomplish the same goal in emacs, not disputing that. But the idea that evil mode can simply replace vim and all of its built in functionality? Just not true, at least not currently.
      - ubercow13 7y ago
        Evil can function in the minibuffer too which is somewhat similar. Regardless, the idea that Evil is no better than IdeaVim is kind of ridiculous.
      - socksy 7y ago
        Isn't that the same as q: (you know, such as there is q: , q/ and q?)? In which case, evil implements this as "evil-command-window-ex", which I'm sure you could bind to ctrl + f too (perhaps that should be filed as an issue with evil). But I'm equally sure that if you made a habit of using e.g. spacemacs, you probably would not need to use it all the time either. But I guess I don't know your workflow. Why do you even use that buffer? I curse every time I accidentally open it.
        s_c_r 7y ago
        I use it for the same reason I use bash history--to view, edit, and reuse ex commands. I'm not surprised that there is a way to customize evil to get to something similar, but my point was that it doesn't work out of the box the way vim does. I've no doubt that it could be implemented, and could file an issue as you suggest, but as someone who uses vim as my daily driver all I can say is every time I fire up evil I run into something like that which immediately turns me off. I guess I just don't have enough appetite for customizing my editor to take up emacs. Just noticed that :h doesn't open the vim help (of course, why should it, this is emacs), but there again, something I use several times a day. I could go on. A big reason I haven't tried harder is that there is no easy path to converting an existing .vimrc to elisp, and over the years I've spent enough time configuring vim to work just the way I want.

zeveb 7y ago

> Thanks for the unsubstantial comment. Given that for decades a primary draw for vi was that it was simple, the fact that people keep adding features to it until it's approaching where Emacs was a few decades ago is noteworthy. Noting that Emacs has had a certain feature for decades, and that the feature has been receiving bug fixes and adding still more sub-features is substantial. Given that users of vim no longer seem to care about simplicity, one has to wonder: why stick with vim? Emacs has a far better extension language (elisp is to vimscript as a thermonuclear weapon is to a sharp stick), evil-mode can accurately replicate the vim editing experience, and Emacs has far more features and packages now than does vim. It's a bit like preferring a race car to a van because you want speed, but then deciding you want to haul packages for a living and bolting on a 2-ton flatbed to the back of your race car. You end up wasting fuel and still not carrying as many packages as you could with a good van — and not running as quickly, either.

mmcgaha 7y ago
Having features and having features that serve a groups needs at the right time are different things. The first time I fired up emacs was in 1995 on a pentium 66 with 8 MB of RAM. It made my computer grind to a halt so editing text was not going to happen. When I tried vi, it ran like I expected a text editor to run. So here I am today, my fingers long trained up to use vi, and I find little need to learn emacs. Sure emacs has had useful features for years, but the barrier to entry was just too high, and now it is too late to win over folks like me.
- mruts 7y ago
  But why is it to late? Evil mode works perfectly. I think you would find the transition quite easy.
  - s_c_r 7y ago
    It works fine as a vim emulation layer, but as a full replacement for vim it does no better than other vim emulations, like IdeaVim. For example, in vim I can hit : to open command line mode followed by ctrl + f to open a mini buffer for ex commands that can be manipulated like any other vim buffer. I use this feature all the time in vim and it isn't available in any of the vim emulation software I've tried. Now, I'm sure there are plenty of ways to accomplish the same goal in emacs, not disputing that. But the idea that evil mode can simply replace vim and all of its built in functionality? Just not true, at least not currently.
    - ubercow13 7y ago
      Evil can function in the minibuffer too which is somewhat similar. Regardless, the idea that Evil is no better than IdeaVim is kind of ridiculous.
    - socksy 7y ago
      Isn't that the same as q: (you know, such as there is q: , q/ and q?)? In which case, evil implements this as "evil-command-window-ex", which I'm sure you could bind to ctrl + f too (perhaps that should be filed as an issue with evil). But I'm equally sure that if you made a habit of using e.g. spacemacs, you probably would not need to use it all the time either. But I guess I don't know your workflow. Why do you even use that buffer? I curse every time I accidentally open it.
      - s_c_r 7y ago
        I use it for the same reason I use bash history--to view, edit, and reuse ex commands. I'm not surprised that there is a way to customize evil to get to something similar, but my point was that it doesn't work out of the box the way vim does. I've no doubt that it could be implemented, and could file an issue as you suggest, but as someone who uses vim as my daily driver all I can say is every time I fire up evil I run into something like that which immediately turns me off. I guess I just don't have enough appetite for customizing my editor to take up emacs. Just noticed that :h doesn't open the vim help (of course, why should it, this is emacs), but there again, something I use several times a day. I could go on. A big reason I haven't tried harder is that there is no easy path to converting an existing .vimrc to elisp, and over the years I've spent enough time configuring vim to work just the way I want.