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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 con

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.

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.