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I used vim for over 25 years before switching to Emacs, so I'm perfectly capable of using both, and do use both.. but for me Emacs does virtually every that vim

I used vim for over 25 years before switching to Emacs, so I'm perfectly capable of using both, and do use both.. but for me Emacs does virtually every that vim does and more, while vim only does a couple of things that I need that Emacs can't, and I find myself needing vim pretty rarely.

colordrops 5y ago
Do you use some sort of extension or plugin to get Emacs to use modal editing and the home row like vim? Or did you switch over to the Emacs key bindings?
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  I use Evil to get modal editing, and have spent countless hours configuring Emacs to be as vim-like as possible. As a result I can easily switch between vim and Emacs and feel completely comfortable editing in both.
  - colordrops 5y ago
    I'd love to switch, but have spent a significant portion of the last four months moving all my personal infra to NixOS. Will need to take a break and spend more time with the kids before diving into something like this again haha
    - mplanchard 5y ago
      When and if you do, be sure to check out the emacs-overlay! It makes it super easy to build/install development versions of emacs, to compile with native-comp, and so on
ducktective 5y ago
Professor Moriarty, a couple of questions: Is this switch because you've moved on to LISPs? Doesn't startup time and lag of emacs (compared to vim) bother you?
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  The startup time of Emacs is not an issue because I only start the Emacs server once and keep it running for a long time, connecting the Emacs client to it as needed. Once the Emacs server is running then connecting to it is as fast or faster than starting vim from scratch. Even restarting Emacs from scratch can be effectively instant, if you don't have a giant config like I do. Vim startup time can be slow too, by the way, if you have a lot of plugins. So, effectively, vim and Emacs don't differ on startup time these days like they used to. As to your question about Lisp, it definitely was a huge draw to Emacs because I fell in love with Lisp and almost the entire ecosystem of Emacs is written in Lisp... and I'd certainly much rather program in Lisp than vimscript, or even Python (or any of the other more mainstream languages). I remember coming across various things I wanted to do in vim that were pretty awkward to do because of how clunky vim and vimscript were. Lisp and Emacs just made doing what I needed much easier overall (though some things were still easier in vim.. for example, vim has some powerful features in its regex engine that don't exist in Emacs, even when using Evil). This was before neovim, so maybe it's better there, though since both vim and neovim lack Emacs' Lisp ecosystem, I doubt they'll ever be able to match Emacs in this respect. There were a lot of other reasons for the switch to Emacs, like having deep web browser and shell integration, being able to read my email from within Emacs, and do a ton of other things from it.. org-mode was another draw.
  - ducktective 5y ago
    While you were using vim, did you use tilling window managers? Did you use a dmenu-driven workflow that calls bash scripts and unix utilities? When people talk about "composability" and "integration" of EMACS, it strikes to me that, vim+i3+unix setup is essentially the same. Just instead of LISP, bash/python is the glue language.
    - joeman1000 5y ago
      But why use so many monolithic tools that don’t want to talk to each other? Why ‘glue’ stuff together? Shouldn’t the underlying system take care of that? That is the appeal of emacs, to me. I don’t have to work hard for uniformity. I implement something once (a theme change, for instance) and it’s reflected everywhere. I want to change the font in emacs? Easy, one line in my config. I want to change the font for all of my programs on my Unix system… far out.
elteto 5y ago
Professor, is it true that Holmes is a Notepad++ user?
- daniel-cussen 5y ago
  More of a hardware user. Hard drugs, hard thought. It's funny Arthur Conan Doyle says Sherlock Holmes is based on I think two guys, but there's a third guy he's also based on Conan Doyle didn't talk about, and that was the guy who cracked cases the hardest, just never talked about because of he was the one the whole coke-injection trances was based on (which was legal at the time). Protected his privacy, you understand. Kind of like Paul Erdos.

colordrops 5y ago

Do you use some sort of extension or plugin to get Emacs to use modal editing and the home row like vim? Or did you switch over to the Emacs key bindings?

pmoriarty 5y ago
I use Evil to get modal editing, and have spent countless hours configuring Emacs to be as vim-like as possible. As a result I can easily switch between vim and Emacs and feel completely comfortable editing in both.
- colordrops 5y ago
  I'd love to switch, but have spent a significant portion of the last four months moving all my personal infra to NixOS. Will need to take a break and spend more time with the kids before diving into something like this again haha
  - mplanchard 5y ago
    When and if you do, be sure to check out the emacs-overlay! It makes it super easy to build/install development versions of emacs, to compile with native-comp, and so on

ducktective 5y ago

Professor Moriarty, a couple of questions: Is this switch because you've moved on to LISPs? Doesn't startup time and lag of emacs (compared to vim) bother you?

pmoriarty 5y ago
The startup time of Emacs is not an issue because I only start the Emacs server once and keep it running for a long time, connecting the Emacs client to it as needed. Once the Emacs server is running then connecting to it is as fast or faster than starting vim from scratch. Even restarting Emacs from scratch can be effectively instant, if you don't have a giant config like I do. Vim startup time can be slow too, by the way, if you have a lot of plugins. So, effectively, vim and Emacs don't differ on startup time these days like they used to. As to your question about Lisp, it definitely was a huge draw to Emacs because I fell in love with Lisp and almost the entire ecosystem of Emacs is written in Lisp... and I'd certainly much rather program in Lisp than vimscript, or even Python (or any of the other more mainstream languages). I remember coming across various things I wanted to do in vim that were pretty awkward to do because of how clunky vim and vimscript were. Lisp and Emacs just made doing what I needed much easier overall (though some things were still easier in vim.. for example, vim has some powerful features in its regex engine that don't exist in Emacs, even when using Evil). This was before neovim, so maybe it's better there, though since both vim and neovim lack Emacs' Lisp ecosystem, I doubt they'll ever be able to match Emacs in this respect. There were a lot of other reasons for the switch to Emacs, like having deep web browser and shell integration, being able to read my email from within Emacs, and do a ton of other things from it.. org-mode was another draw.
- ducktective 5y ago
  While you were using vim, did you use tilling window managers? Did you use a dmenu-driven workflow that calls bash scripts and unix utilities? When people talk about "composability" and "integration" of EMACS, it strikes to me that, vim+i3+unix setup is essentially the same. Just instead of LISP, bash/python is the glue language.
  - joeman1000 5y ago
    But why use so many monolithic tools that don’t want to talk to each other? Why ‘glue’ stuff together? Shouldn’t the underlying system take care of that? That is the appeal of emacs, to me. I don’t have to work hard for uniformity. I implement something once (a theme change, for instance) and it’s reflected everywhere. I want to change the font in emacs? Easy, one line in my config. I want to change the font for all of my programs on my Unix system… far out.

elteto 5y ago

Professor, is it true that Holmes is a Notepad++ user?

daniel-cussen 5y ago
More of a hardware user. Hard drugs, hard thought. It's funny Arthur Conan Doyle says Sherlock Holmes is based on I think two guys, but there's a third guy he's also based on Conan Doyle didn't talk about, and that was the guy who cracked cases the hardest, just never talked about because of he was the one the whole coke-injection trances was based on (which was legal at the time). Protected his privacy, you understand. Kind of like Paul Erdos.