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I used Emacs for 5 years before learning vi. What a change! While Emacs tries to put the kitchen sink inside the editor, vi tries simply to be a keyboard interf

I used Emacs for 5 years before learning vi. What a change! While Emacs tries to put the kitchen sink inside the editor, vi tries simply to be a keyboard interface to the rest of the system. I've never looked back since I learned this way of working.

umvi 7y ago
I've tried several times to get into vim. I feel like it's similar to dvorak though - unless you use it 24/7 you won't develop the muscle memory necessary to use it efficiently.
- KSS42 7y ago
  Using it 12/7 was enough for me for me to be become proficient. ;)
  - ztoben 7y ago
    If it takes 84 hours a week of use in order to become proficient I think I'll pass.
    - kleer001 7y ago
      Maybe 80 hours total, but then that's it. And then you have speedy skills that can serve you in almost any command line environment. AND vi commands are used in a lot of other places, like man pages and such.
    - gen220 7y ago
      second the sibling comment. it's an up-front cost, but it's one that you'll benefit a lot from over the years. I recommend starting with soft plaintext, like a diary. Over time, you can migrate to using it to edit code. My conversion took a couple months, and followed this pattern. I started by editing plaintext diary files. Then, once I was very use to the in-file navigation, I installed vim-mode on my editor of choice at the time, so I could benefit from efficiencies there, while keeping all the IDE benefits. Then, I began the process of replicating all of the features I used in my IDE, in vim. that took maybe another month, and was motivated by how painfully un-snappy my IDE was relative to vim. This is all to say, it doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing cutover. That would be painful and frustrating.
- coliveira 7y ago
  You don't need to go hard core all at once. Start learning a few commands, such as "i", "a", "x", ":w", then add progressively more to your repertoire.
- tombert 7y ago
  It honestly isn't nearly as difficult as learning Dvorak; you can be productive with Vim if you use it full-time for about a week. If you stay dedicated to learning and improving, you can get really good and become pretty productive. While I love Vim and I use it most of the time, I don't really buy it when people act like it saved them a whole lot of time. I love the Vim keystrokes and philosophy, but I don't really know if I'm any more productive with Vim than I was with Emacs...I stick with Vim because I find that, once you "get it", it's relatively easy to translate stuff from your brain to the screen.
  - pikelet 7y ago
    I've always considered that it's more about comfort than productivity. And perhaps that comfort leads to a small increase in productivity, but more because you enjoy it than because it's so much faster to use (as we always say, we spend more time thinking that writing). And because so many tools use vi-style keybindings, if you spend any significant amount of time in a terminal, then you're going to experience that comfort and familiarity all the more.
    - tombert 7y ago
      Yep yep, completely agree. I wish most of my time was spent writing code, but a vast majority is spent reading it and swearing at my monitor because things don't work, so I don't think even a perfect editor would make me a lot more productive, at least not directly, except (as you stated) maybe through me liking the editor a bit more. I personally spend as much time as I can in the terminal, and so my "IDE" is actually is typically NeoVim, tmux, some kind of language-server, and a command line. Am I more productive than my peers using IntelliJ because of this setup? Almost certainly not, but I find it very intuitive for me to do stuff with, since I'm super familiar with the tmux keystrokes, and I find Vim's design really intuitive for me.
- wcpines 7y ago
  Oddly enough, learning Dvorak during a [slow] summer internship and then learning to use Vim regexes to edit/search a couple TCP dumps at my first job probably are the reasons I eventually became interested in scripting/programming and eventually a software developer. Really if it weren't for the first challenge of learning Vim, I wouldn't have learned to program. Which, I know, sounds kind of backwards :P
skohan 7y ago
> simply to be a keyboard interface to the rest of the system Can you expand more on what you mean by that? It's never really clicked with me what the exact value prop of vim is.
- coliveira 7y ago
  Vim gives a consistent and quick interface to editing operations based on a set of standard keys with modifiers. But it doesn't try to be everything to everyone. "plugins" for vi, at least in the classic sense, tend to be minimal. The editor relies more on integration with the UNIX ecosystem. This makes vi unlimited in its possibilities, without having to rely on thousands of lines of lisp code, like emacs does.
  - throwaway_pdp09 7y ago
    > rely on thousands of lines of lisp code, like emacs does Millions actually. I'm an emacs user (who does not want to get into an editor war, mmkay). The plugins are so useful. I'm just learning magit and it very much takes most of the evil and hostility out of Git and I really like it. I also have dired (a sophisticated directory editor), and about to learn loads more such as Bookmark+ which allows links and jumps to anything you set, and allows you to save your desktop layout and files. Emacs has so much, if only you can find it (align-regexp is very useful but there is so much more). Edit: look up M-x occurs if you haven't met it. Mega useful. Consistency is going to be lost as you add functionality. If Vim doesn't have that problem it will in time. Emacs isn't perfect, the package library melpa has dubious quality software, but emacs really is very good indeed.
    - coliveira 7y ago
      That's correct, Emacs is a platform to write applications that can connect to a text editor. This is a different proposition than vi. Like other unix tools, vi goal is to concentrate on one thing (editing), and let the rest, like email reading, git operations, etc., to be handled by other UNIX tools.
pmoriarty 7y ago
I used vi and vim for about 25 years before switching to Emacs. I did this because: 1 - I got deeply interested in Lisp and Scheme, and Emacs was reputed to have the best editing environment for these languages 2 - Almost all of Emacs itself and Emacs' entire package ecosystem is written in eLisp, which is a tremendous improvement over vimscript, in which almost all vim packages are written. I'd just rather read and write eLisp over vimscript any day.[1] 3 - Emacs offers so much more than vim (or neovim). You read and write your email in Emacs, surf the web in Emacs, chat on IRC in Emacs, have deep shell integration in Emacs[2], read RSS news in Emacs, use org-mode (which vim only has pale imitations of) and do just about everything else you'd ever want in it, which is not really the goal of vim, and certainly the opposite of the minimalism of vi. 4 - Emacs had packages that would emulate vim (evil-mode being by far the best and most complete of them all), which would allow me to bring my decades of vim knowledge and plugins over to Emacs, so I'd feel right at home. The switch was a success, and I've been using Emacs for about 10 years now. I have no reason to go back, as Emacs does virtually everything vim does and much more than vim doesn't. There are still a few things I miss from vim, and I still fire it up on systems where Emacs is not installed and where I don't have my Emacs config (I don't like using Emacs' TRAMP mode, for reasons I won't go in to here), and for a few tasks where Emacs just isn't adequate. For instance for editing files with really long lines or gigantic files which Emacs just chokes on.[3] vim's regex engine also has some features Emacs lacks (ie. vim's \zs and \ze zero-width patterns are ones I sorely miss in Emacs). Otherwise, though, evil is a pretty feature-complete emulation of vim, and I don't find myself missing the latter much. It did take me a really, really long time to get my Emacs configured to be the way I liked it, though.. and that's a never-ending process. So I wouldn't necessarily recommend that other vim veterans switch to Emacs unless they've got a huge amount of time on their hands, love tinkering with their configs, and either already love or are open to learning to love Lisp. I happen to be one of those people, so it's worked well for me. [1] - Yes, it's possible to write vim packages in Guile Scheme, but virtually no one does this. A Guile Scheme ecosystem doesn't exist for vim, so if I chose to write Guilde Scheme packages for vim, I'd pretty much be the only one doing it. Not so in Emacs, where everyone writes packages in eLisp. [2] - Emacs' shell integration didn't turn out as great as I expected, as it's vulnerable to Emacs' atrocious handling of long lines, slowness, and buggyness of its shell modes (though libvterm is supposed to offer a real shell inside Emacs, which is reputed to be a lot better than other shell modes written in eLisp, but I haven't tried it). [3] - vim also isn't great at files with super long lines and gigantic files, but it's better than Emacs.
reddit_clone 7y ago
Emacs user here. Emacs' real value is not really in text editing, though it is no slouch in text editing. It does so many other things so well, at this point it is unthinkable for me to not have it. Eg. OrgMode, Magit, Helm, Tramp, Dired and slime to mention a few. Its a lifestyle ;-)
- nameless_me 7y ago
  Agree. Emacs is so much more than a text editor, it is more accurately described as a lifestyle. Operating systems are merely bootloaders for Emacs. ;D
- coliveira 7y ago
  This confirms my point, people using Emacs are not interested in editing alone, but in a platform for elisp code. That's the reason I prefer vi.

umvi 7y ago

I've tried several times to get into vim. I feel like it's similar to dvorak though - unless you use it 24/7 you won't develop the muscle memory necessary to use it efficiently.

KSS42 7y ago
Using it 12/7 was enough for me for me to be become proficient. ;)
- ztoben 7y ago
  If it takes 84 hours a week of use in order to become proficient I think I'll pass.
  - kleer001 7y ago
    Maybe 80 hours total, but then that's it. And then you have speedy skills that can serve you in almost any command line environment. AND vi commands are used in a lot of other places, like man pages and such.
  - gen220 7y ago
    second the sibling comment. it's an up-front cost, but it's one that you'll benefit a lot from over the years. I recommend starting with soft plaintext, like a diary. Over time, you can migrate to using it to edit code. My conversion took a couple months, and followed this pattern. I started by editing plaintext diary files. Then, once I was very use to the in-file navigation, I installed vim-mode on my editor of choice at the time, so I could benefit from efficiencies there, while keeping all the IDE benefits. Then, I began the process of replicating all of the features I used in my IDE, in vim. that took maybe another month, and was motivated by how painfully un-snappy my IDE was relative to vim. This is all to say, it doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing cutover. That would be painful and frustrating.
coliveira 7y ago
You don't need to go hard core all at once. Start learning a few commands, such as "i", "a", "x", ":w", then add progressively more to your repertoire.
tombert 7y ago
It honestly isn't nearly as difficult as learning Dvorak; you can be productive with Vim if you use it full-time for about a week. If you stay dedicated to learning and improving, you can get really good and become pretty productive. While I love Vim and I use it most of the time, I don't really buy it when people act like it saved them a whole lot of time. I love the Vim keystrokes and philosophy, but I don't really know if I'm any more productive with Vim than I was with Emacs...I stick with Vim because I find that, once you "get it", it's relatively easy to translate stuff from your brain to the screen.
- pikelet 7y ago
  I've always considered that it's more about comfort than productivity. And perhaps that comfort leads to a small increase in productivity, but more because you enjoy it than because it's so much faster to use (as we always say, we spend more time thinking that writing). And because so many tools use vi-style keybindings, if you spend any significant amount of time in a terminal, then you're going to experience that comfort and familiarity all the more.
  - tombert 7y ago
    Yep yep, completely agree. I wish most of my time was spent writing code, but a vast majority is spent reading it and swearing at my monitor because things don't work, so I don't think even a perfect editor would make me a lot more productive, at least not directly, except (as you stated) maybe through me liking the editor a bit more. I personally spend as much time as I can in the terminal, and so my "IDE" is actually is typically NeoVim, tmux, some kind of language-server, and a command line. Am I more productive than my peers using IntelliJ because of this setup? Almost certainly not, but I find it very intuitive for me to do stuff with, since I'm super familiar with the tmux keystrokes, and I find Vim's design really intuitive for me.
wcpines 7y ago
Oddly enough, learning Dvorak during a [slow] summer internship and then learning to use Vim regexes to edit/search a couple TCP dumps at my first job probably are the reasons I eventually became interested in scripting/programming and eventually a software developer. Really if it weren't for the first challenge of learning Vim, I wouldn't have learned to program. Which, I know, sounds kind of backwards :P

skohan 7y ago

> simply to be a keyboard interface to the rest of the system Can you expand more on what you mean by that? It's never really clicked with me what the exact value prop of vim is.

coliveira 7y ago
Vim gives a consistent and quick interface to editing operations based on a set of standard keys with modifiers. But it doesn't try to be everything to everyone. "plugins" for vi, at least in the classic sense, tend to be minimal. The editor relies more on integration with the UNIX ecosystem. This makes vi unlimited in its possibilities, without having to rely on thousands of lines of lisp code, like emacs does.
- throwaway_pdp09 7y ago
  > rely on thousands of lines of lisp code, like emacs does Millions actually. I'm an emacs user (who does not want to get into an editor war, mmkay). The plugins are so useful. I'm just learning magit and it very much takes most of the evil and hostility out of Git and I really like it. I also have dired (a sophisticated directory editor), and about to learn loads more such as Bookmark+ which allows links and jumps to anything you set, and allows you to save your desktop layout and files. Emacs has so much, if only you can find it (align-regexp is very useful but there is so much more). Edit: look up M-x occurs if you haven't met it. Mega useful. Consistency is going to be lost as you add functionality. If Vim doesn't have that problem it will in time. Emacs isn't perfect, the package library melpa has dubious quality software, but emacs really is very good indeed.
  - coliveira 7y ago
    That's correct, Emacs is a platform to write applications that can connect to a text editor. This is a different proposition than vi. Like other unix tools, vi goal is to concentrate on one thing (editing), and let the rest, like email reading, git operations, etc., to be handled by other UNIX tools.

pmoriarty 7y ago

I used vi and vim for about 25 years before switching to Emacs. I did this because: 1 - I got deeply interested in Lisp and Scheme, and Emacs was reputed to have the best editing environment for these languages 2 - Almost all of Emacs itself and Emacs' entire package ecosystem is written in eLisp, which is a tremendous improvement over vimscript, in which almost all vim packages are written. I'd just rather read and write eLisp over vimscript any day.[1] 3 - Emacs offers so much more than vim (or neovim). You read and write your email in Emacs, surf the web in Emacs, chat on IRC in Emacs, have deep shell integration in Emacs[2], read RSS news in Emacs, use org-mode (which vim only has pale imitations of) and do just about everything else you'd ever want in it, which is not really the goal of vim, and certainly the opposite of the minimalism of vi. 4 - Emacs had packages that would emulate vim (evil-mode being by far the best and most complete of them all), which would allow me to bring my decades of vim knowledge and plugins over to Emacs, so I'd feel right at home. The switch was a success, and I've been using Emacs for about 10 years now. I have no reason to go back, as Emacs does virtually everything vim does and much more than vim doesn't. There are still a few things I miss from vim, and I still fire it up on systems where Emacs is not installed and where I don't have my Emacs config (I don't like using Emacs' TRAMP mode, for reasons I won't go in to here), and for a few tasks where Emacs just isn't adequate. For instance for editing files with really long lines or gigantic files which Emacs just chokes on.[3] vim's regex engine also has some features Emacs lacks (ie. vim's \zs and \ze zero-width patterns are ones I sorely miss in Emacs). Otherwise, though, evil is a pretty feature-complete emulation of vim, and I don't find myself missing the latter much. It did take me a really, really long time to get my Emacs configured to be the way I liked it, though.. and that's a never-ending process. So I wouldn't necessarily recommend that other vim veterans switch to Emacs unless they've got a huge amount of time on their hands, love tinkering with their configs, and either already love or are open to learning to love Lisp. I happen to be one of those people, so it's worked well for me. [1] - Yes, it's possible to write vim packages in Guile Scheme, but virtually no one does this. A Guile Scheme ecosystem doesn't exist for vim, so if I chose to write Guilde Scheme packages for vim, I'd pretty much be the only one doing it. Not so in Emacs, where everyone writes packages in eLisp. [2] - Emacs' shell integration didn't turn out as great as I expected, as it's vulnerable to Emacs' atrocious handling of long lines, slowness, and buggyness of its shell modes (though libvterm is supposed to offer a real shell inside Emacs, which is reputed to be a lot better than other shell modes written in eLisp, but I haven't tried it). [3] - vim also isn't great at files with super long lines and gigantic files, but it's better than Emacs.

reddit_clone 7y ago

Emacs user here. Emacs' real value is not really in text editing, though it is no slouch in text editing. It does so many other things so well, at this point it is unthinkable for me to not have it. Eg. OrgMode, Magit, Helm, Tramp, Dired and slime to mention a few. Its a lifestyle ;-)

nameless_me 7y ago
Agree. Emacs is so much more than a text editor, it is more accurately described as a lifestyle. Operating systems are merely bootloaders for Emacs. ;D
coliveira 7y ago
This confirms my point, people using Emacs are not interested in editing alone, but in a platform for elisp code. That's the reason I prefer vi.