7 ms·

How a Vim user converts to Emacs

92 points by gnosis 16y ago

narrator 16y ago
I've read that a few Vim users have switched to Emacs to take advantage of ENSIME, which is a really nifty Scala development environment.
- rayvega 16y ago
  Org-Mode is another reason I've heard for switching.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - gnok 16y ago
    I'm a heavy vim user and I find org-mode pretty interesting. Has anyone tried VimOrganizer (https://github.com/hsitz/VimOrganizer https://github.com/hsitz/VimOrganizer) and compared it with Org-Mode? I've considered switching to emacs often, but I get put off each time just looking at the cursor movement keys.
  - sigzero 16y ago
    https://github.com/hsitz/VimOrganizer https://github.com/hsitz/VimOrganizer Vims answer...
  - abhiyerra 16y ago
    I recently switched from Vim to Emacs and org-mode was the selling point. But Emacs Lisp and M-x tetris are also good reasons I suppose.
  - kanak 16y ago
    I'm one of the people who switched from Vim to Emacs due to Org mode, and I've never regretted the decision. In the past year, I've used org-mode to take all my notes in class, write documents and as a task manager. All in all, the gain in productivity due to org-mode massively eclipses the time it took to un-learn vim and become decent at emacs.
    - agentultra 16y ago
      You can also write and tangle code in it for literate programming purposes. You can also read-in values into the programming code in the org-file and return results to it as well.. so you could technically run your unit tests in the file and return the results in a nicely formatted org-table. :) You just can't do that stuff with vim. I used to be a really hard-core vim guy but I eventually switched. Now I'm an emacs-or-nothing guy. :)
stanislavb 16y ago
He doesn't :)
ez77 16y ago
It's a shame he didn't keep writing: all three entries are from June 2007.
- crazydiamond 16y ago
  He now has RSI :(
Flankk 16y ago
Vim has great text navigation features but nothing I can't do with a mouse as fast or faster. With a mouse I can scroll two pages, highlight and replace a function in about two seconds. It would take me far longer to do this using keyboard shortcuts. Most of my time spent coding isn't spent on navigation of text files anyway. Most code is very modular and I switch between text files frequently. In an IDE, you have a navigational tree of your files from which you can find and switch to a different file in about two seconds. Does anyone have any evidence that vim is actually faster at these two things, and not just hype? If not evidence, at least solutions to the above two problems which you think are faster than using an IDE?
- ozataman 16y ago
  You'd be amazed how fast you move around and do edit actions once VIM shortcuts become second nature.
- eterps 16y ago
  For me this is hard to understand. Either I haven't seen anyone who is able to 'mouse' as fast as you can. Or you haven't yet seen someone who is really good at Vim.
  - masterj 16y ago
    I didn't understand until I saw one of my professors, who lives in vim, work on some code. It was mind-bending. I can only imagine that when watching me type code (at the time) he must have felt how I feel when I watch my parents use the internet.
    - ghotli 16y ago
      As a man who lives and breathes vim, the answer to your question is most certainly yes. Watching other people code without mastery of their editor is heartwrenching.
      - ez77 16y ago
eterps 16y ago
There is a difference between Vim 'the concept' and Vim 'the program'. I like the first one, but I couldn't care less if I am running vim itself, emacs with Viper mode, Vimperator or what have you. To me a person who is running emacs with Viper mode is still a vim/vi user.
- gfodor 16y ago
  How far off is viper mode from vim, anyway? Anyone who uses it regularly care to share how close it gets you to vim-level speed?
  - gnosis 16y ago
    From what I understand, viper is not intended to be a vim emulator, but rather a vi emulator (if you could even call it that). As a long-time vim user switching to emacs (just to edit lisp code), viper mode does not feel very comfortable or familiar. Sure, the basics are similar. But to get a good handle on how to use it and configure it to your liking, you have to read a ton of documentation. Also, configuring it effectively seems to require being familiar with many emacs concepts and ways of doing things. A vim user is really going to be lost until he does a ton of reading on this stuff. And even then, it's going to take him a long time to feel comfortable with it. And that's not to mention that by default viper only works in a very limited number of emacs modes. You can configure it to work in more modes, but then you'll loose out on a lot of default emacs features that are tightly integrated in to the regular configuration of those emacs modes. You may be able to reconfigure those modes to allow them to be used more naturally in viper, but that's going to be a lot of work (and, again, require you to learn a lot about emacs). So if you're a vim user switching to emacs, don't expect viper to make you feel at home. Vimpulse extends viper to be just a bit more like vim, but it's really just a thin gloss over the basic viper functionality. Even with vimpulse, some of the basics may be the same, but you're still going to be very far from vim. And even if you do spend the time to learn enough about emacs and learn enough about viper to customize it to be much more like vim, you're still never going to be able to replicate one crucial aspect that makes vim such a joy to use: its thousands of plugins. Sure, emacs has its own packages and extenstions that probably do many of the same things (arguably, for some of them, maybe even more). But if you use them you're going to be essentially just using regular emacs, with a vi or vim gloss over it. If you're a vim user and you like, know, and regularly use many vim scripts and plugins, those aren't going to magically become available for you to use in emacs, even with vim and vimpulse. If you need any of the functionality of these extensions in emacs, you're just going to have to find the emacs equivalent and learn how to use it. This is going to be yet another major drain on your time. Of course, if you're committed to really making a complete switch to emacs, it might be worth your time. But if, like me, you only want to use emacs for a limited subset of things, you're probably going to have to learn to live without the ease and convenience you get from your scripts and plugins you have in vim (unless you're willing to put a major amount of time and effort in finding, learning and configuring the emacs equivalents).
kia 16y ago
Does anyone here switched from Emacs to Vim? Comments?
- fingerprinter 16y ago
  I had a progression like this: Emacs -> Vi(m) -> Emacs When I started programming in college it was Lisp and C and I got a co-op working for a big defense contractor doing C and everyone there used Emacs so I used Emacs. I remember being very good at it at the time. Then I started to do quite a bit of sys admin work along with Perl and web scripting during the dotcom days and switched to Vi as I found it much quicker to use when doing sys admin tasks and Perl was quite simple as well. Then I started to do enterprise Java development. I call these my 'dark years'. Eclipse, IntelliJ and others but with Vi keybindings if I could find plugins for them (search and replace in Vi is great...love just hitting the '/' and beginning to type.) Then I started to do some Erlang and Clojure and I Vi wasn't cutting it anymore. So I started to use Emacs again (this is about 12 years later at this point, btw) and realized I didn't remember anything. So I grabbed Emacs Start Kit on github, forked it and started to hack up an environment I felt comfortable in. Slowly It has been coming back to me, but in the time since I was out of Emacs there have been some good advancements. At this point, I think I have the best of both worlds in that I know Vi(m) pretty well, have a really good .vimrc that I like and I also have an ability to use Emacs for non-trivial tasks and feel I'll be able to really use it in about 3 more months of steady use. The weirdest thing is trying to hit escape (or 'jj' as I've remapped it) in Emacs... All in all, I think I will end up preferring Emacs for non-trivial tasks and still use Vim for basic text editing or sys admin tasks. I do like both for their various strong points, but at the same time I have to say that both are quite annoying in other ways. I just have to learn to love their strengths rather than hate their weaknesses.
  - unoti 16y ago
    You raise an interesting point: what you're editing has a big impact on the effectiveness of the editor you're using. When I first learned vi, I kind of hated it because I was editing code on an ancient system that used a COBOL-like language, in which most things were in upper case. Because vi's commands are all case sensitive, combined with the fact that I used capslock a lot for coding, it was kind of a pain. Also this language did not use a c-like syntax with punctuation, it instead used a lot of english words. Later when I switched to editing C source code with vi, suddenly vi's quirks and methods of operation become far, far more productive than they were using vi.
gcb 16y ago
vim is a text editor. Now if you are writting html you will open 4 different browsers in emacs? You have a window manager for a reason.
hakl 16y ago
Found an article on switching to Vim after two decades of using Emacs: http://pinard.progiciels-bpi.ca/notes/Thoughts_on_editors.html http://pinard.progiciels-bpi.ca/notes/Thoughts_on_editors.ht... And another one on converting to Emacs from Vim: http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2008/10/from_Vim_to_Emacs_-_part_1/ http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2008/10/from_Vim_to_Emacs...
julian37 16y ago
I've always thought that the whole vi(m) vs. Emacs "war" is a false dichotomy. I'm an Emacs guy myself; I haven't used vi(m) a lot, but from all I gather it's a fine editor. The real "enemy", if we need to use war-inspired vocabulary, are editors like nedit, Kate, ScITE, and maybe even Textmate (boy am I going to get told off for this!) Emacs and vi(m) are great editors today, but imagine how much even greater they would be if all those people pouring hundreds and thousands of man-hours into projects like Gedit, JEdit, KWrite, Medit, etc. would have instead put their efforts towards improving the true editors! Disclaimer: I haven't really used those other editors a lot and I'm sure that each of them has something going for it. Also, I know how much fun it is to work on something challenging, like a text editor, even if (or exactly because) there are already established "solutions". Finally, a few alternative editors are genuinely useful, such as nano - it might be inferior in pretty much every regard to Emacs, but it's not possible to shrink Emacs to nearly the size of nano so it does seem to serve a valuable purpose for when disk space or memory footprint is an issue. Cue the Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping jokes. EDIT: and yes, Emacs/vi(m) are not necessarily the be-all, end-all of editors for all time to come; maybe one of those alternative editors will one day prove to be superior. All those other editors just remind me of the phrase "Those who don't understand Emacs/vi are condemned to reinvent it, poorly"... err, or something like that.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  > The real "enemy", if we need to use war-inspired vocabulary, are editors like nedit, Kate, ScITE, and maybe even Textmate (boy am I going to get told off for this!) Don't forget Eclipse.
  - scorpion032 16y ago
    Neither Windows. All those web browsers, IRC clients, email programs. You can do pretty much everything inside an emacs.
    - rbanffy 16y ago
      If you ever draw a Venn diagram of Windows users and Emacs users, you'll see the intersection of both sets is vanishingly small.
eccp 16y ago
In my case, I'm learning Emacs after ~15 years avoiding it. I use a combination of Vim, Eclipse and Netbeans for enterprisey Java, but after that many years of a fixed mindset, I'm trying to reinvent myself and I'm trying both Clojure, JRuby and Git; Emacs has great modules to integrate them with ease. Currently I don't have the fluency I had with Vim but I think the effort will pay itself on the long run. The key is to practice and use Emacs as much as you can everyday.
Create 16y ago
I think this is purely a cultural background issue. People with systems/sysadmin etc. background have been mentored and thus grew up to use vi (it is available from any unix terminal prompt and is not an OS in itself™). People who grew up in comp/sci/phy used to see emacs as their first editor, and used it mostly graphically. I think switching is done either as a switch given because of the evolution of one's functional role -- be it involuntary or voluntary (latter just for fun or self improvement).
Create 16y ago
This reminds me of one of the best real-life history log entries I have seen: vi .emacs
- prodigal_erik 16y ago
  Around 1990 I went through a phase of using vi for trivial edits, because I could finish them in less time than it would take for Emacs to start on the shared(!) hosts available to me. After that, the bounty of Moore's law let me keep one open all the time.

92 points by gnosis 16y ago

I've read that a few Vim users have switched to Emacs to take advantage of ENSIME, which is a really nifty Scala development environment.

rayvega 16y ago
Org-Mode is another reason I've heard for switching.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- gnok 16y ago
  I'm a heavy vim user and I find org-mode pretty interesting. Has anyone tried VimOrganizer (https://github.com/hsitz/VimOrganizer https://github.com/hsitz/VimOrganizer) and compared it with Org-Mode? I've considered switching to emacs often, but I get put off each time just looking at the cursor movement keys.
- sigzero 16y ago
  https://github.com/hsitz/VimOrganizer https://github.com/hsitz/VimOrganizer Vims answer...
- abhiyerra 16y ago
  I recently switched from Vim to Emacs and org-mode was the selling point. But Emacs Lisp and M-x tetris are also good reasons I suppose.
- kanak 16y ago
  I'm one of the people who switched from Vim to Emacs due to Org mode, and I've never regretted the decision. In the past year, I've used org-mode to take all my notes in class, write documents and as a task manager. All in all, the gain in productivity due to org-mode massively eclipses the time it took to un-learn vim and become decent at emacs.
  - agentultra 16y ago
    You can also write and tangle code in it for literate programming purposes. You can also read-in values into the programming code in the org-file and return results to it as well.. so you could technically run your unit tests in the file and return the results in a nicely formatted org-table. :) You just can't do that stuff with vim. I used to be a really hard-core vim guy but I eventually switched. Now I'm an emacs-or-nothing guy. :)

stanislavb 16y ago

He doesn't :)

ez77 16y ago

It's a shame he didn't keep writing: all three entries are from June 2007.

crazydiamond 16y ago
He now has RSI :(

Flankk 16y ago

Vim has great text navigation features but nothing I can't do with a mouse as fast or faster. With a mouse I can scroll two pages, highlight and replace a function in about two seconds. It would take me far longer to do this using keyboard shortcuts. Most of my time spent coding isn't spent on navigation of text files anyway. Most code is very modular and I switch between text files frequently. In an IDE, you have a navigational tree of your files from which you can find and switch to a different file in about two seconds. Does anyone have any evidence that vim is actually faster at these two things, and not just hype? If not evidence, at least solutions to the above two problems which you think are faster than using an IDE?

ozataman 16y ago
You'd be amazed how fast you move around and do edit actions once VIM shortcuts become second nature.
eterps 16y ago
For me this is hard to understand. Either I haven't seen anyone who is able to 'mouse' as fast as you can. Or you haven't yet seen someone who is really good at Vim.
- masterj 16y ago
  I didn't understand until I saw one of my professors, who lives in vim, work on some code. It was mind-bending. I can only imagine that when watching me type code (at the time) he must have felt how I feel when I watch my parents use the internet.
  - ghotli 16y ago
    As a man who lives and breathes vim, the answer to your question is most certainly yes. Watching other people code without mastery of their editor is heartwrenching.
    - ez77 16y ago

eterps 16y ago

There is a difference between Vim 'the concept' and Vim 'the program'. I like the first one, but I couldn't care less if I am running vim itself, emacs with Viper mode, Vimperator or what have you. To me a person who is running emacs with Viper mode is still a vim/vi user.

gfodor 16y ago
How far off is viper mode from vim, anyway? Anyone who uses it regularly care to share how close it gets you to vim-level speed?
- gnosis 16y ago
  From what I understand, viper is not intended to be a vim emulator, but rather a vi emulator (if you could even call it that). As a long-time vim user switching to emacs (just to edit lisp code), viper mode does not feel very comfortable or familiar. Sure, the basics are similar. But to get a good handle on how to use it and configure it to your liking, you have to read a ton of documentation. Also, configuring it effectively seems to require being familiar with many emacs concepts and ways of doing things. A vim user is really going to be lost until he does a ton of reading on this stuff. And even then, it's going to take him a long time to feel comfortable with it. And that's not to mention that by default viper only works in a very limited number of emacs modes. You can configure it to work in more modes, but then you'll loose out on a lot of default emacs features that are tightly integrated in to the regular configuration of those emacs modes. You may be able to reconfigure those modes to allow them to be used more naturally in viper, but that's going to be a lot of work (and, again, require you to learn a lot about emacs). So if you're a vim user switching to emacs, don't expect viper to make you feel at home. Vimpulse extends viper to be just a bit more like vim, but it's really just a thin gloss over the basic viper functionality. Even with vimpulse, some of the basics may be the same, but you're still going to be very far from vim. And even if you do spend the time to learn enough about emacs and learn enough about viper to customize it to be much more like vim, you're still never going to be able to replicate one crucial aspect that makes vim such a joy to use: its thousands of plugins. Sure, emacs has its own packages and extenstions that probably do many of the same things (arguably, for some of them, maybe even more). But if you use them you're going to be essentially just using regular emacs, with a vi or vim gloss over it. If you're a vim user and you like, know, and regularly use many vim scripts and plugins, those aren't going to magically become available for you to use in emacs, even with vim and vimpulse. If you need any of the functionality of these extensions in emacs, you're just going to have to find the emacs equivalent and learn how to use it. This is going to be yet another major drain on your time. Of course, if you're committed to really making a complete switch to emacs, it might be worth your time. But if, like me, you only want to use emacs for a limited subset of things, you're probably going to have to learn to live without the ease and convenience you get from your scripts and plugins you have in vim (unless you're willing to put a major amount of time and effort in finding, learning and configuring the emacs equivalents).

kia 16y ago

Does anyone here switched from Emacs to Vim? Comments?

fingerprinter 16y ago
I had a progression like this: Emacs -> Vi(m) -> Emacs When I started programming in college it was Lisp and C and I got a co-op working for a big defense contractor doing C and everyone there used Emacs so I used Emacs. I remember being very good at it at the time. Then I started to do quite a bit of sys admin work along with Perl and web scripting during the dotcom days and switched to Vi as I found it much quicker to use when doing sys admin tasks and Perl was quite simple as well. Then I started to do enterprise Java development. I call these my 'dark years'. Eclipse, IntelliJ and others but with Vi keybindings if I could find plugins for them (search and replace in Vi is great...love just hitting the '/' and beginning to type.) Then I started to do some Erlang and Clojure and I Vi wasn't cutting it anymore. So I started to use Emacs again (this is about 12 years later at this point, btw) and realized I didn't remember anything. So I grabbed Emacs Start Kit on github, forked it and started to hack up an environment I felt comfortable in. Slowly It has been coming back to me, but in the time since I was out of Emacs there have been some good advancements. At this point, I think I have the best of both worlds in that I know Vi(m) pretty well, have a really good .vimrc that I like and I also have an ability to use Emacs for non-trivial tasks and feel I'll be able to really use it in about 3 more months of steady use. The weirdest thing is trying to hit escape (or 'jj' as I've remapped it) in Emacs... All in all, I think I will end up preferring Emacs for non-trivial tasks and still use Vim for basic text editing or sys admin tasks. I do like both for their various strong points, but at the same time I have to say that both are quite annoying in other ways. I just have to learn to love their strengths rather than hate their weaknesses.
- unoti 16y ago
  You raise an interesting point: what you're editing has a big impact on the effectiveness of the editor you're using. When I first learned vi, I kind of hated it because I was editing code on an ancient system that used a COBOL-like language, in which most things were in upper case. Because vi's commands are all case sensitive, combined with the fact that I used capslock a lot for coding, it was kind of a pain. Also this language did not use a c-like syntax with punctuation, it instead used a lot of english words. Later when I switched to editing C source code with vi, suddenly vi's quirks and methods of operation become far, far more productive than they were using vi.

gcb 16y ago

vim is a text editor. Now if you are writting html you will open 4 different browsers in emacs? You have a window manager for a reason.

hakl 16y ago

Found an article on switching to Vim after two decades of using Emacs: http://pinard.progiciels-bpi.ca/notes/Thoughts_on_editors.html http://pinard.progiciels-bpi.ca/notes/Thoughts_on_editors.ht... And another one on converting to Emacs from Vim: http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2008/10/from_Vim_to_Emacs_-_part_1/ http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2008/10/from_Vim_to_Emacs...

julian37 16y ago

I've always thought that the whole vi(m) vs. Emacs "war" is a false dichotomy. I'm an Emacs guy myself; I haven't used vi(m) a lot, but from all I gather it's a fine editor. The real "enemy", if we need to use war-inspired vocabulary, are editors like nedit, Kate, ScITE, and maybe even Textmate (boy am I going to get told off for this!) Emacs and vi(m) are great editors today, but imagine how much even greater they would be if all those people pouring hundreds and thousands of man-hours into projects like Gedit, JEdit, KWrite, Medit, etc. would have instead put their efforts towards improving the true editors! Disclaimer: I haven't really used those other editors a lot and I'm sure that each of them has something going for it. Also, I know how much fun it is to work on something challenging, like a text editor, even if (or exactly because) there are already established "solutions". Finally, a few alternative editors are genuinely useful, such as nano - it might be inferior in pretty much every regard to Emacs, but it's not possible to shrink Emacs to nearly the size of nano so it does seem to serve a valuable purpose for when disk space or memory footprint is an issue. Cue the Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping jokes. EDIT: and yes, Emacs/vi(m) are not necessarily the be-all, end-all of editors for all time to come; maybe one of those alternative editors will one day prove to be superior. All those other editors just remind me of the phrase "Those who don't understand Emacs/vi are condemned to reinvent it, poorly"... err, or something like that.

rbanffy 16y ago
> The real "enemy", if we need to use war-inspired vocabulary, are editors like nedit, Kate, ScITE, and maybe even Textmate (boy am I going to get told off for this!) Don't forget Eclipse.
- scorpion032 16y ago
  Neither Windows. All those web browsers, IRC clients, email programs. You can do pretty much everything inside an emacs.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    If you ever draw a Venn diagram of Windows users and Emacs users, you'll see the intersection of both sets is vanishingly small.

eccp 16y ago

In my case, I'm learning Emacs after ~15 years avoiding it. I use a combination of Vim, Eclipse and Netbeans for enterprisey Java, but after that many years of a fixed mindset, I'm trying to reinvent myself and I'm trying both Clojure, JRuby and Git; Emacs has great modules to integrate them with ease. Currently I don't have the fluency I had with Vim but I think the effort will pay itself on the long run. The key is to practice and use Emacs as much as you can everyday.

Create 16y ago

I think this is purely a cultural background issue. People with systems/sysadmin etc. background have been mentored and thus grew up to use vi (it is available from any unix terminal prompt and is not an OS in itself™). People who grew up in comp/sci/phy used to see emacs as their first editor, and used it mostly graphically. I think switching is done either as a switch given because of the evolution of one's functional role -- be it involuntary or voluntary (latter just for fun or self improvement).

Create 16y ago

This reminds me of one of the best real-life history log entries I have seen: vi .emacs

prodigal_erik 16y ago
Around 1990 I went through a phase of using vi for trivial edits, because I could finish them in less time than it would take for Emacs to start on the shared(!) hosts available to me. After that, the bounty of Moore's law let me keep one open all the time.