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From Vim to Emacs in fourteen days (2015)
- dang 6y agoJust for fun, here are some of the larger past threads. Others? After over a decade of Vim, I’m hooked on Emacs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16551796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16551796 - March 2018 (161 comments) A pragmatic decision on GNU Emacs versus Vim for programming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13590944 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13590944 - Feb 2017 (59 comments) Why I switched from Vim to Emacs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13130775 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13130775 - Dec 2016 (101 comments) From Vim to Emacs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8367384 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8367384 - Sept 2014 (116 comments) Emacs and Vim - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8084359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8084359 - July 2014 (275 comments) Vi and Vim vs. Emacs Shootout and Deal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3205828 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3205828 - Nov 2011 (52 comments) Some thoughts on Emacs and Vim - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2229040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2229040 - Feb 2011 (40 comments) How a Vim user converts to Emacs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2036586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2036586 - Dec 2010 (66 comments) On vim vs emacs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1374916 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1374916 - May 2010 (28 comments) Debian's Vim maintainer switches to Emacs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=341492 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=341492 - Oct 2008 (32 comments)
- davidw 6y agoEmacs vs Vim is like comfort food for software-related online discussions.
- bitwize 6y agoAnd it's even more useless fluff than it was back in the day because people used Vim and Emacs in large numbers back then. These days the vast bulk of professional developers use Visual Studio Code. Compared to VSCode vs. IntelliJ, Vim vs. Emacs is a sideshow at best.
- jimbokun 6y ago> Vim vs. Emacs is a sideshow at best. Until you need to ssh into a server and edit something.
- arc-in-space 6y agoI need to make a conscious effort to stay the hell away whenever this comes up here on hn. It's not the only topic that does this, but it's by far the least productive one, lang wars can at least be educational.
- rtpg 6y agoI guess, given how evil-mode just gets better and better every day I'm not really seeing many people moving in the other direction, at least based on the blog posts. No shade on Vim, people like it and are productive in it. I see it like using Sublime Text, lots of people can get away with it, but I need more doodads in my editor. And hey, nobody is like "Notepad++ vs. Visual Studio", which I think kinda matches the mismatch (or maybe "Notepad++ vs Atom" or something)
- joadha 6y agoHere's the thing, though. I don't use Vim as an IDE. I use it on live servers to change configs / scripts / app code (don't tell anyone) quickly and efficiently. I don't think "extra doodads" would help with that, and I'm not sure I'd want to manage those dependencies on my platform anyway. If I'm actually developing something that's part of a greater whole, then I'm using a fully fledged IDE like PyCharm (but with the VIM emulator plugged in for when I need it, of course ;-D). Likewise, no shade at Emacs, though. Several of my favorite colleagues use it!
- champagnepapi 6y agoChanges to PRODUCTION app code on server?! I’ve seen this happen once or twice at my current company. Not the best of times...
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 6y agoEveryone has a test environment. Some are lucky enough to have a separate production environment.
- soraminazuki 6y agoContrary to what many might expect, Emacs tools are quite good for performing sysadmin tasks: * TRAMP for remote editing. It's more powerful than Vim's netrw remote editing capabilites and can handle root-owned files on remote servers. It's so extensible there's even a package that allows you to edit files inside Docker containers running on remote servers. * Dired. It's the best text-based file manager out there IMHO, and it integrates very nicely with TRAMP. * Org mode. It can be used like Jupyter notebook, but is far more powerful. You can write each code block in any language you choose, pass data between them, and make each of them run on different servers. This is very useful for sysadmin tasks especially in professional environments because it allows you to document each step in a reproducible manner as you're executing it. You can then just share the org document for your cowokers to review. I personally use Vim for coding and Emacs for non-trivial sysadmin tasks.
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoOne of our oldest and proudest flame-wars. In 2001, Slashdot held a poll for Best Flame War. [0] The winner, by quite a margin, was Operating System, but the text editor wars (presently being fought at [1]) weren't listed as an option. Personally I'm also rather fond of the tabs-vs-spaces debate. [0] https://slashdot.org/poll/699/best-flame-war https://slashdot.org/poll/699/best-flame-war [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26431864 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26431864
- ph2082 6y agoFrom >> Debian's Vim maintainer switches to Emacs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=341492 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=341492 - Oct 2008 (32 comments) He warned me I should switch from vi to emacs because prolonged vi usage causes hair loss. :)
- ARandomerDude 6y agoMaybe, but prolonged emacs use causes carpal tunnel syndrome!
- gypsyharlot 6y agoOnly if you don't use a keyboard the way it was intended. For example, Ctrl-c should involve both hands. If you press Ctrl-c with only your left hand (there's a reason your keyboard has a right Ctrl), you will gradually hurt your wrists. Emacs can accelerate this, since a lot of things begin with Ctrl-x, assuming that you never use the right side Ctrl.
- mvanaltvorst 6y agoI have never had carpal tunnel-like symptoms yet, though I just realised I've only used left ctrl for the past 10 years. I'll definitely be more mindful of that. Do you have any more resources on avoiding common typing pitfalls, or specific wrist movements one should avoid while typing? Should capitalising your sentences be a two-hand action as well, considering I normally only use left shift?
- mercer 6y agoMacs don't have a right Ctrl, unfortunately.
- hirundo 6y ago> If, like me, you’re curious enough to give Emacs a try... So curiosity rather than conversion. Six year later is he still using Emacs? Went back to Vim? Moved on to something else? I have enough years invested in muscle memory of Vim itself and various plugins that what curiosity I have about Emacs is well controlled. I doubt I have runway left to get to the same productivity in another editor.
- zarkov99 6y agoAn interesting path is to go from regular emacs to emacs with vim bindings, which is what I did, also in around 14 days. Its painful, but good for you brain. And you get the best of both worlds, or so I like to think.
- alpaca128 6y agoI tried that too for a bit over two weeks. In the end I had a comfortable configuration, but with noticably worse performance and a lot of inconsistencies. Whenever I use Emacs I kind of like the concept but at the same time feel like the good parts are buried beneath countless random additions that should have been optional plugins. I dare to claim that >95% of Emacs users do not use its integrated Tetris implementation, for example.
- zarkov99 6y agoYou might be right, though I do not have a good reference to compare Emacs + evil with. I think by default Emacs is a somewhat mediocre editor, the one thing that saves it is the unparalleled customizability, which should allow you to slowly prune the randomness and inconsistencies. But it is a commitment, not everybody wants a relationship with their editor. Btw, I regularly play Tetris in emacs ;-)
- alpaca128 6y agoDefinitely. But the thing is, coming from Vim with a custom configuration I'm at a point where I'd first need to reverse engineer parts of Emacs and reconfigure a ton just to get back to where I left Vim. And if I learned something when trying it out then it's the futility of trying to cram Vim into it expecting it to work without a Frankenstein's monster vibe. There's always something off or incomplete. I don't think I'll try it again soon, but if I do it would be with something like God mode; for one because Evil mode somehow breaks Emacs when run in the terminal, and also because Vim and Emacs just don't mesh together well imho. They are both excellent at doing very similar things, but their approaches are just not compatible.
- tyingq 6y ago"Finally, install evil-mode, the Vim emulation package for Emacs" Anyone use this regularly? Does it kill off some of the upside of emacs?
- hypersoar 6y agoI don't use evil mode, but I don't see how it could kill any of the upside of Emacs, which has very little to do with keybindings.
- dan-robertson 6y agoEvil mode is very popular (see doom emacs or spacemacs which try to integrate lots of emacs extensions with evil mode on by default)
- tarboreus 6y agoReally, no. It's a huge portion of the user base of Emacs, and gets a lot of support. Might be a few issues here and there but highly surmountable and you'll be in company.
- asciimov 6y agoI use it regularly. It integrates quite well with emacs and if you use the evil-collection you can add vim-ness to other modes. Personally, I mostly just use evil for modal editing, as I am a long time vim user. Then I use the emacs shortcuts on top of that.
- sigmonsays 6y agoI went from vim to emacs for development in go and python. I Went with doom emacs, which is a configuration distribution already prebuilt which is friendly to vimm users (ie, evil mode). It was rough at first, required writing lots of cheat sheets and also changing workflows a little. I feel much more productive in emacs than vim. IMHO, its more straightforward to google "How to do X in emacs" than "how to do X in vim" and actually end up with a productive configuration change.
- alfiedotwtf 6y agoI’m curious to hear from folks who have switched between the two, and have lasted for more than a year on both. If you’ve learned more than the basics and both became muscle memory, which did you end up sticking to? (Vim user for 23 years, Emacs user of none... but interested because of Lisp)
- auslegung 6y agoI’m a nvim user of 2 years, a doom emacs user of 6 months. I don’t intend to go back to nvim because org mode is just too wonderful, and doom emacs does a great job of making emacs speedy, though of course it could never be as speedy as vim, I rarely notice it
- TrisMcC 6y agoI was a vim user for 16 years (very proficient -- other developers in whatever office I was in would ask me vim questions) when I switched to emacs about 8 years ago. I switched for curiousity and to check out evil mode and magit. A couple years ago during a lull in a dev cycle I built a neovim setup to see the state of that art but I didn't stick with it. I've rewritten my emacs configuration many times, swapped between spacemacs, vanilla, and doom. I am currently on doom emacs with my customizations. I also do not use evil mode anymore. Default emacs bindings make a lot of sense to me. I can still use vim with muscle memory, but I reach for "mg" if I need a quick edit more often than not.
- vcxy 6y agoI have used both daily for over a year (and emacs alone for a few years). Once I was used to vim, I started using evil in emacs. So, at least in reference to muscle memory, I ended up sticking with vim. The thing is, evil is a mostly complete vim implementation. If I were forced to choose one editor, it would definitely be emacs.
- Jach 6y agoI'll just say if you want to do Common Lisp, vim works fine, so don't let that hold you back from pursuing your interest. The slimv plugin is good. (Some people also like vlime better. To be honest I've had some buggy experiences with both, I suggest try both and pick what you like. vlime has one debugging improvement in that you don't need to manually call (swank-backend:restart-frame N).) I'd like to give emacs one more chance, but haven't gotten around to it. Last time I tried Spacemacs (for about a month, sorry not a year) and ultimately didn't like it, I'm planning on trying Doom Emacs next.
- mjfl 6y agoI started with emacs and never learned vim. What am I missing?
- auslegung 6y agoA decent text editor
- gotts 6y agoI used vim for a decade and tried to switch to vanilla emacs. I didn't like code navigation in emacs at all. After a few weeks of fighting it, I switched to evil-mode emacs and was pretty happy since then.
- fileeditview 6y agostellar speed
- syntheticnature 6y agoVi's sense of composability. For example, 'd' is the delete command, but what does it delete? It deletes across a motion. What is a motion? Could be any movement mode supported by the editor, which ranges from simple cursor motions to motions involving words or blocks to forms of searching to raw line number jumps. So, once you learn a vi command, you can use it with all the motions you already know, and once you learn a motion, you can use it with all the commands you already know. The other aspect, that is more insidiously useful: vi is almost everywhere, and will easily fit on an embedded system. It's a rare server that doesn't have it, either. This is definitely vi, not vim, when I say this, though.
- soldeace 6y agoI can relate. Going from Emacs to evil-mode (not pure vim) has been a bliss. Text and code editing feels almost like playing a game.
- rnmp 6y agoTotally agree about it feeling like playing a game. It’s probably because of the combos and just how fast things can be when you move around! I use neovim but I’m sure the experience we have is the same.
- efiecho 6y agoEmacs is a great OS but it lacks a decent text editor.
- pimeys 6y agoIt has one now: called evil-mode.
- andrewzah 6y agoThis article fails to explain -why- one would want to switch to emacs from vim. Org-mode and configuring emacs in a lisp-like are cool, but are not worth re-learning everything for me. I put that time in already by reading "Practical Vim" by Drew Neil and other vim literature online. I'm sure everyone is already aware, but vi is available basically everywhere. This has saved my ass at least twice where I couldn't access vim or had internet access to install XYZ editor. So as a power vim user I see no reason to switch. If I can't use vim, most editors now have support for reasonable vim bindings. So I use that for Jetbrains' products / Joplin / Insomnia / etc.
- asciimov 6y agoFor me, I wanted access to org-mode, as well as the emacs ecosystem of packages. emacs has good vim emulation through the evil package. Doom emacs, is a decent place to start for a vimmer.
- jeromenerf 6y agoI just use emacs+evil for org only. Org is feature rich (bloated?) but these dynamic code blocks in documents are just too good. I prefer vim for everything else and the general "minimalist" approach in particular. Emacs seems to appeal to people who like to do everything within one tool.
- e12e 6y agoI know org.mode is a deep rabbit hole - but do you have an example of "dynamic code blocks in documents"? I've recently switched my "notes.txt" buffer in (neo)vim to markdown ("notes.md) - along with a slightly more magical syntax plug-in - and I'm pleasantly surprised by the quality of life improvements from having multiple code/script snippets highlighted in-line (eg: ```SQL (... Snippet...) ``` in a paragraph followed by some notes and a block of bash etc). But I rarely execute the blocks in / from vim - I do a bit of copy-pasting though (I don't generally fit a terminal buffer/window in vim, I use a separate window with gnome-terminal or Sakura. I tried term-in-vim, but didn't quite like the flow. Maybe I should try again).
- mkl95 6y agoI have been using Emacs for several years now, I love how easy it makes it to quickly browse and edit code. The only downside is that coding without Emacs keybindings makes me uncomfortable and kind of sloppy. Fortunately most IDEs have an Emacs plugin.
- every 6y agoFrom Vim or Emacs to Nano in fourteen minutes...
- bogwog 6y agoVim is my go-to terminal-based text editor, and I used it for a decent amount of time, but when I finally decided to switch to something like Sublime Text, I never felt the need to go back. Maybe it's because I'm not a "touch typist" who uses a home row and all that stuff, so the keybindings optimized for that don't really help me that much. I do like Vim though, and it's an insanely useful skill to have because I can SSH into any server and edit config files like if I were straight up programming.
- sumnole 6y agoYou can enable Vintage Mode in Sublime Text to get the best of both worlds.
- maximilianroos 6y agoFor those who use Vim bindings, and would like to try out emacs, I'd suggest trying Spacemacs: https://www.spacemacs.org/ https://www.spacemacs.org/ It has "evil mode" by default — the vim bindings. I picked this up at Jane Street, where much of the internal tooling is in emacs. I still use it wherever I can't get a good vscode setup, and it has some advantages over vscode.
- cwlb 6y agoI picked up spacemacs earlier this year but have since switched to Doom emacs: https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs it's smaller, faster, and you configure it in a way that's closer to vanilla emacs. The size makes it more tractable to learn. The creator & primary maintainer is more active, funny, and helpful than the spacemacs maintainer who I believe is on hiatus. I wish someone had told Doom about it before I picked up spacemacs so maybe this post will benefit past-future-me.
- maximilianroos 6y agoThanks! It looks good. I'll check it out more.
- cutler 6y agoI've been using Spacemacs for Clojure development for years but stable has been stuck on the same version for ages so is it actually maintained?
- Graziano_M 6y agoYou should switch to develop. They are working on release 300 and there are commits being merged daily.
- cutler 6y agoIt's been thaty way for years so not very encouraging. With develop I can't just click Update Packages. Any advantages these days of staying with Spacemacs over Doom?
- keithnz 6y agowouldn't this just be.... How to go from Vim to any other Editor/IDE and use Vim bindings ...
- salmo 6y agoIn college I used Emacs, because I had a romance with lisps and just really enjoyed extending stuff. Also used Sawfish as my window manager, etc. The modal thing in vi(m) was hard for me to wrap my head around and the bizarre config of vim seemed so inelegant. But when I got a gig as a sysadmin running a few thousand servers w/ a slew of Unixes (Solaris, BSD, HP-UX, Linux) I finally bit the bullet and learned vi, because it was the only common denominator (oh, man and ksh88 because so many bash-es were so broken on those platforms). Now I find modal editing very natural and productive and don't miss the keyboard gymnastics of emacs. I find I get pissed at every text editor that isn't vi. Outlook, this text box, etc. I use IntelliJ (and do Python and Go in it) with vi binding for large long-lived projects and just vim/neovim in a terminal for scripts, short-lived stuff, and quick edits. The bindings in IntelliJ are good enough, although sometimes I forget and try to do things, like run a file through awk. I play with using VSCode with vi bindings from time to time, but honestly just forget to use it much. I have a smallish vim config with a handful of plugins, mostly for linting. I'm comfortable with it and haven't ever really found it lacking. And I don't feel the need to maintain a codebase for my config like I enjoyed doing in college. I guess I garden in my garden vs my config files and am not so focused on some kind of concept of purity. Heck, I think I have the default background on my mac.
- omoikane 6y ago> this text box, etc. I always keep a GVIM window open so that I can type text there and then paste those into other places that are not vi. It also helps that vi is a lot more stable than certain websites and is less likely to lose my text. It's nice to be able to just copy&paste without having to re-type the same text when browser crashes.
- bjoli 6y agoAs always, the Emacs experience is better: https://github.com/zachcurry/emacs-anywhere https://github.com/zachcurry/emacs-anywhere :)
- soraminazuki 6y ago
- monoideism 6y agoI've tried to get into emacs, VS Code, and Sublime (all w/Vi keybindings, of course), but I always seem to find myself back in Vim (or Neovim).
- drums8787 6y agoI went in the other direction about 5 years ago after 20 years of always installing Emacs on every computer I ever used. Vim has had a much bigger impact on my productivity. Partly because of excellent plugins (VSCode, Visual Studio), partly because, for some reason I bothered to learn Vim shortcuts to degree I never did with Emacs. And I just love that vi and vim is quick and available on my various cloud servers. Once in a while I toy with the idea of going back and using evil mode (I keep reading about org mode).
- SkyMarshal 6y agoFwiw Spacemacs is another good combination of the two, similar to evil mode. https://www.spacemacs.org/ https://www.spacemacs.org/
- kirubakaran 6y agoDoom too https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs
- poidos 6y ago+1 for Doom. I tried spacemacs for a while but didn't find it enjoyable. Doom was exactly what I needed and now I don't use anything else.
- tincholio 6y agoSpacemacs has been gradually breaking over the years, and is a lot more complex than Doom. I migrated about a year ago, and save for some fairly minimal muscle-memory adaptation and modifications to some packages' config, it's been very smooth sailing.
- drums8787 6y agoThank you. Went down a small rabbit hole reading about Doom & Spacemacs and am pretty sure I'll pull the trigger, to get org mode and magit.
- antonvs 6y ago
- yudlejoza 6y agoIf you switched from vim to evil-on-emacs, you didn't really switch to emacs. You switched to something akin to a best-of-both-worlds.
- simonblack 6y agoWhat is this new-fangled Emacs?? WordStar ought to be enough for anybody!
- BeetleB 6y agoEmacs is older than Wordstar.
- lelanthran 6y ago> Emacs is older than Wordstar. True, but only because Emacs is older than God :-) (They say they used parenthesis, but it was just snippets of Perl everywhere: https://xkcd.com/224/ https://xkcd.com/224/)
- signa11 6y agoemail sig: In the beginning was the lambda, and the lambda was with Emacs, and Emacs was the lambda.
- loloquwowndueo 6y agoIt probably took me longer than 14 days to learn vim after using emacs for years, it was worth it - mainly and specifically I switched because vim’s modal nature means fewer finger contortions to reach 6 modifier keys simultaneously as required with emacs - that was giving me RSI symptoms. I’ve been happy with vim since and it tends to be more easily available in remote systems. To each their own though - both editors are ok :)
- dfox 6y agoWell I'm long time emacs user who switche to emacs from vi(m) in essentially the time it took to go through the C-h t tutorial. While today I dont't use Emacs as the day-to-day editor (I use VSCode, for a bunch of not entirely good reasons that mostly have to do with macOS) I think that exposing people new to unix to emacs/zile makes more sense than to vi(m). And then there is the "every mac textfield understands default emacs key bindings" effect...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mrbonner 6y agoDoes it feel weird that you have to enable Evil mode to use emacs? I have been using Vim for most my life and switched to emacs last years. I am using vanilla version with lots of plugins of course.
- soraminazuki 6y agoNot really. Evil's vim emulation are quite impressive, and it's doing its best to make the bindings available everywhere in Emacs. However, the behavior of each keys in different buffers are somewhat less consistent than with Vim, which is inevitable because Emacs buffers are used more like an UI for elisp applications. I think the benefits far outweigh the minor inconsistencies though.
- squid_demon 6y agoProbably took 12 of those 14 days to just get Emacs loaded. Just saying.
- da39a3ee 6y agoI love emacs as a lisp environment to work in and have used it for 20 years but the emacs LSP picture is starting to look seriously sketchy in comparison with what more language-specific IDEs such as VSCode and PyCharm etc offer. Especially now that static typing is becoming standard in languages like Python and Javascript. If you have a lot of spare time you can probably make eglot and lsp-mode work in your favorite language. But if you work in a few languages, you sort of need to be working part time and have no family or social commitments.
- auslegung 6y agoMy only experience with emacs is doom emacs, and only about 6 months, but I haven’t felt this pain other than getting the right formatter to format. I’m doing frontend react work so primarily tsx and sass, so maybe not a counterpoint but
- brescia85 6y agoMy experience with lsp-mode is quite the opposite. I was able to configure it with rust-analyzer/gopls/pyright for half a day and I would say that it is very close to "just works". Previously I was using VScode and emacs only for org-mode.
- jhbadger 6y agoAm I the only person who uses Lem? An Emacs-clone written and extended in Common Lisp rather than the weird version of Lisp Emacs uses. https://github.com/lem-project/lem https://github.com/lem-project/lem
- andy_threos_io 6y agoI tried it, but the underlying Roswell system isn't perfect at least. Simple Make fails on linux out of the box. And the look&feel and features are very far from emacs.
- arunc 6y ago20 years of vim user here. I learnt Emacs for just one thing. Magit! Except that I don't have any other use for Emacs.
- fhunt 6y agoThere are not as far apart as I thought https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=vim,emacs https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=v...
- hannofcart 6y agoRecently, I too tried making the switch from vim to Emacs via the Spacemacs route. The effort didn't last long. I found that Spacemacs, without installing any extra "layers" than what comes out of the box, consumes too much RAM. Over 1GB of it. Don't know if this was expected or if it was something specific to just my machine.
- jhchabran 6y agoMay I advise to give a try to Doom instead? It has less ambitious objectives [1] and feels much snappier while providing a similar experience (vim-like, out of the box) Also, if you enjoy the experience provided by emacs + evil, giving a try to the native compilation branch of emacs 28 gives noticeable improvement in terms of speed. [1] Spacemacs "it's a sophisticated and polished set-up, focused on ergonomics, mnemonics and consistency" VS being focused on speed, https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs#introduction https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs#introduction
- hannofcart 6y agoThanks for taking the time to give a detailed recommendation. Setting up Doom right now!
- gspr 6y agoTangentially related: I've used emacs for coding for a decade, and for email for a few years. I love it. But I'm missing out on its arguably strongest feature: elisp! My config file is a tragedy of stuff I hamfistedly cobbled together. I'd like to learn this skill properly, and thus conquer the world (I assume this makes me able to). Can anyone recommend a resource? I speak some C-like languages, and Python and Haskell, but no LISP at all. I'm an emacs user, but have only superficial knowledge of how emacs actually works.
- JohnL4 6y agoMore replies than you can shake a stick at here. https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/47318/how-can-i-start-learning-emacs-lisp https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/47318/how-can-i-st... (I've been cluelessly hacking at emacs for decades, and there's ALWAYS something new to learn.)
- gspr 6y agoThanks!
- JohnL4 6y agohttps://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/LearnEmacsLisp https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/LearnEmacsLisp looks pretty good, too, actually.
- jhchabran 6y agoIf anyone wants to give a try, it's worth noting a few things if you come from vim: - if you are on osx, you'll may find the gui rendering quite laggy if you are using a Retina display. Using the terminal will make it snappy again. Using something like Alacritty will make it even snappier if you're sensitive to it. - if you are on linux and use the gui, the pgtk branch is worth giving a try, it drops the old extremely outdated Xt code - LSP can be quite resource hungry, it's really worth giving a try to the nativecomp branch of emacs 28. https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GccEmacs https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GccEmacs
- afarviral 6y agoI want to love emacs with default bindings but find them unergonomic to the extreme. However I think VIMs bindings and multimodal text editing is a false economy, so I don't want to just use evil-mode (spacemacs or DOOM). In other IDEs and OSs there is a consistent scheme for copy, paste, undo, redo but no consistent scheme for new-line-above/below or movement near the home row keys using modifiers. I've been experimenting with alt+[some homerow keys] for movement and left-hand w/modifiers for changes similar to ergoemacs, in vscode. The realisation I've had is that there is an absence of standardized keybindings for text editing across IDEs/editors and the complexity and lack of interoperability rolling-your-own make that approach universally avoided. This means we are in a rut going back and forth between emacs and vim and OS keybindings, and the editor wars are just a symptom of a greater problem. The real issue is that there is not enough R&D on efficiency and human-oriented design and/or this hasn't influenced current standards to a great enough degree. Aside from in a terminal I'm not convinced (if timed/tested) the average coder using the mouse heavily with left-hand shortcuts would be any less capable than a vim guru. Accuracy with a mouse is something that can be improved too, just look at competitive FPS games. I'd also posit the mouse coder spent more time learning coding and less time fiddling with his tools. Does anyone know where I could find more info about this stuff? Does anyone know of any research comparing the efficiency/speed/stress of VIM users to, say, VS Code keybindings or emacs ones? I am a productive vim user already and have just learned standard emacs bindings and ergoemacs bindings within a few hours. This is not a matter of a vim-naiive person avoiding learning the tool. I do have a preoccupation with tools rather than getting stuff done with them... That's our curse isn't it?
- iLemming 6y agoHere we go again. Vim vs. Emacs. A decades-old argument that actually doesn't have any merits. Because Vim and Emacs are two distinct categories. The only thing that makes them similar is that they are both based on something. That something is an idea. And not just an ordinary, everyday concept, but an influential, holy grail type of thing. Vi and the concept of the modality is an incredible, powerful, fantastic model. People who never hardheartedly tried to learn Vi-model just don't get to say anything about it. Can you respect an opinion about CRISPR coming from someone who has no clue about polynucleotide chains and DNA? Yes, Vim is not overly intuitive for a complete beginner. Like many, perhaps most awesome tools, it too has a certain level of sophistication. You cannot enter the Suez or Panama Canal gates' control room and suggest removing all those knobs, switches, buttons, etc., and instead, install one colossal touch screen because that would be "a much more intuitive interface". Vim is hard to learn, but you see, there's usually a strong correlation between something that's not so easy to acquire and simplicity gained later. Conversely, things that are easy to pick up, very often later become cumbersome and annoyingly counter-productive. Rich Hickey's "Simple Made Easy" rhetoric very nicely manifests that. So yes, Vi-model is an incredible idea. Vim, Neovim, Evil, etc., are just implementations of that idea. Now, Emacs is based on another mind-blowing idea. The idea of practical notation for lambda calculus, what is known as Lisp. Lisp, probably can be crowned as the most important idea in computer science. It's just hard to think of something more influential than Lisp. Emacs is just a practical implementation (and frankly, not the best one) of that idea. Arguing what's better - Emacs or Vim is like debating what was more important in the history of health care - the invention of anesthesia or discovery of penicillin. Both Vim and Emacs are awesome, and one is not better than another. If you can't see that - then probably there's a big hole in your understanding of at least one of the ideas they are based on.