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> I'm pretty sure Emacs has spoiled me Comments like this make a long time Vim lover like me very curious, but I guess not curious enough to try it. Maybe one

> I'm pretty sure Emacs has spoiled me Comments like this make a long time Vim lover like me very curious, but I guess not curious enough to try it. Maybe one day. What both Emacs and Vim have in common is an intimidating learning curve. You can't just dip your toe in. You gotta jump in head first, sink for awhile and then hopefully learn to swim. Only then will you know if you like it.

shadowofneptune 4y ago
This was not my experience with Emacs, oddly enough. I started using it because it was the only editor that both supported a terminal and had a top bar. Like a windows program, pressing F10 gets you a File, Options, etc. menu that helped me get through that first session. Emacs (and other Vi's, I should note) has made a nod towards accessibility that Vim has not.
- w0m 4y ago
  As a long-time Vim'er who has had a dalliance with emacs a few times before fleeing - I always saw the bar and had no idea how to use it. f10. Nice. What always got me was how it still* felt sluggish on my intel 32gb rMBP.
  - jacobsenscott 4y ago
    Performance has improved a lot. I'm on version 28 with native compilation enabled and I just opened a 12599 line yaml file and there is no lag. In the prior version the file was pretty much uneditable in emacs. There are probably still cases where vim outperforms emacs, but for any reasonably sized file it should be good.
    - pdimitar 4y ago
      Every single time I press M-x my Emacs lags. I use Emacs 29 RC with JIT compilation. Seldom any difference at all. Granted I use a Doom derivative that shows a popup where you see command auto-completion but in 2023 this is absolutely inexcusable, if not laughable.
      - jacobsenscott 4y ago
        It is likely the fault of an extension or misconfiguration. It is instant for me, with ivy typeahead/fuzzy match magic. You would need to start uninstalling packages until you find the offender. I don't know if that is easy with something like doom since a ton is stuff is pre-installed.
        pdimitar 4y ago
        Exactly the problem. I lost all will to tinker with it (and I've done that a lot in the past). If it can't work reasonably well out of the box then it is a failure. I'm already eating down votes in another comment which ironically only cements my decision to move away from Emacs.
        nequo 4y ago
        >> Granted I use a Doom derivative that shows a popup > If it can't work reasonably well out of the box then it is a failure. It is not out of the box though, is it? It sounds like the code that shows you the popup might not ship with stock Emacs. Do you get the lag if you start Emacs with `emacs -Q`? Do you get it with Doom proper?
        pdimitar 4y ago
        Switching Emacs distro sounds like doing a favor to a friend that kept stealing my money but I'll grant you that yes, I'm not using stock Doom and that might be the problem. Can't promise I'll try again ever. I tinkered a good amount and lost faith. Nothing should need that much time and effort spent to have basic stuff working acceptably.
        nequo 4y ago
        That's fair. The most important thing is that you get your work done.
        4y ago
- u801e 4y ago
  gvim has a menu bar by default. I believe it's possible to enable it in the terminal assuming vim has been compiled with the necessary options.
  - shadowofneptune 4y ago
    Ah, this is what I was thinking of when I said other Vi's. Did not realize it's a fork of Vim.
nequo 4y ago
> What both Emacs and Vim have in common is an intimidating learning curve. You can't just dip your toe in. Another thing that Emacs and Vim have in common is Vim keybindings.[1] You can pick Emacs keybindings up at your own pace. From one vimmer to another, if you want to try out Emacs, I highly recommend doing it with Evil. [1] https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil
- nocman 4y ago
  I second that recommendation. If you have many years of experience with vim, evil-mode allows you to keep a lot of that and add good stuff from emacs.
spamizbad 4y ago
FWIW vim was my first "serious" editor and I switched to Doom Emacs (which defaults vi keybindings) and couldn't be happier. Although tbh if I didn't have vim muscle memory I probably would've landed on VSCode.
- bo-tato 4y ago
  same, and I surprisingly found it quicker to get used to doom emacs coming from vim, than it took me to get used to a modern neovim setup which I also tried briefly
- _0w8t 4y ago
  VSCode has vim extensions emulating keybindings similarly to Emacs Evil mode. Although I am not a fun of vim I ended up using one of those when I needed to switch between VScode on Mac and Windows on a daily basis due to uniformity of keybindings. My only wish is for Vim not to use Ctrl key at all. Then difference between Mac and PC keyboards will not affect muscle memory at all.
  - weaksauce 4y ago
    vscode has a neovim extension you can use that shells out to an actual vim for normal mode. it's better than the emulation one and it's quite fast.
kneebonian 4y ago
I was a long time vim only user, that lived and breathed in the terminal. Then I found Doom Emacs, and it gave me everything I never knew I wanted or needed. I'd highly recommend giving doom emacs a try. There is also a great series of videos on how to use Doom Emacs on youtube.
- theonething 4y ago
  Thanks! Do you or any other emacs users contend with "emacs pinky"? I'm prone to typing related wrist pain and have to be proactive about avoiding it.
  - kneebonian 4y ago
    I don't know for sure what the emacs pinky is but one of the things doom does is maps the ctrl key to space bar, I find myself rarely having to leave home row now.
  - tmtvl 4y ago
    I have used Emacs for around 5 years now (about as long as I used Vim) and I find the Emacs keybindings more ergonomical. Though that might just be because I have long and agile fingers.
  - michaelhoffman 4y ago
    I use a Kinesis Advantage2 keyboard that has Ctrl, Alt (Meta for Emacs), and Win at the space bar. Some ergonomic setup like this is going to work much better than the usual suggestion of remapping CapsLock to Ctrl.
    - celrod 4y ago
      I second the suggestion of getting ergonomic keyboards with thumb clusters. I also have the Kinesis advantage 2, and am also a fan of the convex keys. I also ordered a Kinesis 360 several months ago, but have not received it yet.
  - ntonauta 4y ago
outworlder 4y ago
> What both Emacs and Vim have in common is an intimidating learning curve. You can't just dip your toe in. You kinda can, these days. One of the main issues is that Emacs is, out of the box, the most complete toolbox you'll ever see, while at the same time being very incomplete. You have an email client, spreadsheet, unit converter, ASCII drawing, debugger, file explorer and so on and so forth. Meanwhile, you open a Python file and you are lacking a bunch of stuff that the likes of VSCode have out of the box. So the solution is to customize, and that takes an inordinate amount of time. Thankfully, some other people have solved this for us: https://www.spacemacs.org/ https://www.spacemacs.org/ Spacemacs has VI commands by default - and I don't mean just the simplest keybindings like some VI emulators do, it's using evil-mode and it's pretty good. It can also be used in 'holy' mode (Emacs keybindings). There's also(the one I use): https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs Either of these will get you a much more modern Emacs experience out of the box. You may need to add packages (it wouldn't be feasible to add all packages that everyone could possibly want), but they make it easy. Even though Emacs now comes with a package manager, it doesn't have any opinion on how you configure things. Both Spacemacs and Doom Emacs are opinionated, and that's a good thing. Sure, you still need to learn concepts and keybindings. Thankfully, there's no shortage of tutorials, and Emacs own built-in documentation is very good. It also has a built-in tutorial, which is how I learned.
- pdimitar 4y ago
  Spacemacs is slow as molasses on macOS and yes I have the latest Emacs. It became so bad I switched to a Doom derivative (CentaurEmacs) and while it did improve the speed, it merely reduced it from "almost impossible to work with" to "noticeably and annoyingly laggy fairly often". I gave up on Emacs after trying to make it work for a loooong time. Carefully and slowly making my way through NeoVim in the last 6 or so months now, and it's much easier to work with and configure, not to mention 99.9% of everything is instant (the only time it lagged was opening a source file of 1.7M size and I suspect the slowness came from the LSP server and not NeoVim itself). Emacs seems to be carried by nostalgia from folks that love to tinker with their tools more than they like to actually get any job done. A bit of a toxic statement, surely, but I'm pretty salty still and I haven't seen any objective evidence to make me look at Emacs and its fans more charitably. For anything and everything the answer always is "hack it for the 6328th time to make it even more your own!" No thanks. I actually have a job to do.
weaksauce 4y ago
you should install doom emacs. it has some vim stuff baked into it and you also get the absolutely awesome git ui that I can't stress enough is the best piece of software written in a long time. sounds like hyperbole but it's seriously so well made. doom emacs. press spacebar to get a menu of things you can do and you also get a bunch of vim stuff for free. I don't use emacs as a daily driver but I still use it exclusively for the magit mode for git. a caveat that you should be aware of is that you do need to learn a bit about emacs. what's a frame/buffer and how to kill them but that's not too bad.

shadowofneptune 4y ago

This was not my experience with Emacs, oddly enough. I started using it because it was the only editor that both supported a terminal and had a top bar. Like a windows program, pressing F10 gets you a File, Options, etc. menu that helped me get through that first session. Emacs (and other Vi's, I should note) has made a nod towards accessibility that Vim has not.

w0m 4y ago
As a long-time Vim'er who has had a dalliance with emacs a few times before fleeing - I always saw the bar and had no idea how to use it. f10. Nice. What always got me was how it still* felt sluggish on my intel 32gb rMBP.
- jacobsenscott 4y ago
  Performance has improved a lot. I'm on version 28 with native compilation enabled and I just opened a 12599 line yaml file and there is no lag. In the prior version the file was pretty much uneditable in emacs. There are probably still cases where vim outperforms emacs, but for any reasonably sized file it should be good.
  - pdimitar 4y ago
    Every single time I press M-x my Emacs lags. I use Emacs 29 RC with JIT compilation. Seldom any difference at all. Granted I use a Doom derivative that shows a popup where you see command auto-completion but in 2023 this is absolutely inexcusable, if not laughable.
    - jacobsenscott 4y ago
      It is likely the fault of an extension or misconfiguration. It is instant for me, with ivy typeahead/fuzzy match magic. You would need to start uninstalling packages until you find the offender. I don't know if that is easy with something like doom since a ton is stuff is pre-installed.
      - pdimitar 4y ago
        Exactly the problem. I lost all will to tinker with it (and I've done that a lot in the past). If it can't work reasonably well out of the box then it is a failure. I'm already eating down votes in another comment which ironically only cements my decision to move away from Emacs.
        nequo 4y ago
        >> Granted I use a Doom derivative that shows a popup > If it can't work reasonably well out of the box then it is a failure. It is not out of the box though, is it? It sounds like the code that shows you the popup might not ship with stock Emacs. Do you get the lag if you start Emacs with `emacs -Q`? Do you get it with Doom proper?
        pdimitar 4y ago
        Switching Emacs distro sounds like doing a favor to a friend that kept stealing my money but I'll grant you that yes, I'm not using stock Doom and that might be the problem. Can't promise I'll try again ever. I tinkered a good amount and lost faith. Nothing should need that much time and effort spent to have basic stuff working acceptably.
        nequo 4y ago
        That's fair. The most important thing is that you get your work done.
        4y ago
u801e 4y ago
gvim has a menu bar by default. I believe it's possible to enable it in the terminal assuming vim has been compiled with the necessary options.
- shadowofneptune 4y ago
  Ah, this is what I was thinking of when I said other Vi's. Did not realize it's a fork of Vim.

nequo 4y ago

> What both Emacs and Vim have in common is an intimidating learning curve. You can't just dip your toe in. Another thing that Emacs and Vim have in common is Vim keybindings.[1] You can pick Emacs keybindings up at your own pace. From one vimmer to another, if you want to try out Emacs, I highly recommend doing it with Evil. [1] https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil

nocman 4y ago
I second that recommendation. If you have many years of experience with vim, evil-mode allows you to keep a lot of that and add good stuff from emacs.

spamizbad 4y ago

FWIW vim was my first "serious" editor and I switched to Doom Emacs (which defaults vi keybindings) and couldn't be happier. Although tbh if I didn't have vim muscle memory I probably would've landed on VSCode.

bo-tato 4y ago
same, and I surprisingly found it quicker to get used to doom emacs coming from vim, than it took me to get used to a modern neovim setup which I also tried briefly
_0w8t 4y ago
VSCode has vim extensions emulating keybindings similarly to Emacs Evil mode. Although I am not a fun of vim I ended up using one of those when I needed to switch between VScode on Mac and Windows on a daily basis due to uniformity of keybindings. My only wish is for Vim not to use Ctrl key at all. Then difference between Mac and PC keyboards will not affect muscle memory at all.
- weaksauce 4y ago
  vscode has a neovim extension you can use that shells out to an actual vim for normal mode. it's better than the emulation one and it's quite fast.

kneebonian 4y ago

I was a long time vim only user, that lived and breathed in the terminal. Then I found Doom Emacs, and it gave me everything I never knew I wanted or needed. I'd highly recommend giving doom emacs a try. There is also a great series of videos on how to use Doom Emacs on youtube.

theonething 4y ago
Thanks! Do you or any other emacs users contend with "emacs pinky"? I'm prone to typing related wrist pain and have to be proactive about avoiding it.
- kneebonian 4y ago
  I don't know for sure what the emacs pinky is but one of the things doom does is maps the ctrl key to space bar, I find myself rarely having to leave home row now.
- tmtvl 4y ago
  I have used Emacs for around 5 years now (about as long as I used Vim) and I find the Emacs keybindings more ergonomical. Though that might just be because I have long and agile fingers.
- michaelhoffman 4y ago
  I use a Kinesis Advantage2 keyboard that has Ctrl, Alt (Meta for Emacs), and Win at the space bar. Some ergonomic setup like this is going to work much better than the usual suggestion of remapping CapsLock to Ctrl.
  - celrod 4y ago
    I second the suggestion of getting ergonomic keyboards with thumb clusters. I also have the Kinesis advantage 2, and am also a fan of the convex keys. I also ordered a Kinesis 360 several months ago, but have not received it yet.
- ntonauta 4y ago

outworlder 4y ago

> What both Emacs and Vim have in common is an intimidating learning curve. You can't just dip your toe in. You kinda can, these days. One of the main issues is that Emacs is, out of the box, the most complete toolbox you'll ever see, while at the same time being very incomplete. You have an email client, spreadsheet, unit converter, ASCII drawing, debugger, file explorer and so on and so forth. Meanwhile, you open a Python file and you are lacking a bunch of stuff that the likes of VSCode have out of the box. So the solution is to customize, and that takes an inordinate amount of time. Thankfully, some other people have solved this for us: https://www.spacemacs.org/ https://www.spacemacs.org/ Spacemacs has VI commands by default - and I don't mean just the simplest keybindings like some VI emulators do, it's using evil-mode and it's pretty good. It can also be used in 'holy' mode (Emacs keybindings). There's also(the one I use): https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs Either of these will get you a much more modern Emacs experience out of the box. You may need to add packages (it wouldn't be feasible to add all packages that everyone could possibly want), but they make it easy. Even though Emacs now comes with a package manager, it doesn't have any opinion on how you configure things. Both Spacemacs and Doom Emacs are opinionated, and that's a good thing. Sure, you still need to learn concepts and keybindings. Thankfully, there's no shortage of tutorials, and Emacs own built-in documentation is very good. It also has a built-in tutorial, which is how I learned.

pdimitar 4y ago
Spacemacs is slow as molasses on macOS and yes I have the latest Emacs. It became so bad I switched to a Doom derivative (CentaurEmacs) and while it did improve the speed, it merely reduced it from "almost impossible to work with" to "noticeably and annoyingly laggy fairly often". I gave up on Emacs after trying to make it work for a loooong time. Carefully and slowly making my way through NeoVim in the last 6 or so months now, and it's much easier to work with and configure, not to mention 99.9% of everything is instant (the only time it lagged was opening a source file of 1.7M size and I suspect the slowness came from the LSP server and not NeoVim itself). Emacs seems to be carried by nostalgia from folks that love to tinker with their tools more than they like to actually get any job done. A bit of a toxic statement, surely, but I'm pretty salty still and I haven't seen any objective evidence to make me look at Emacs and its fans more charitably. For anything and everything the answer always is "hack it for the 6328th time to make it even more your own!" No thanks. I actually have a job to do.

weaksauce 4y ago

you should install doom emacs. it has some vim stuff baked into it and you also get the absolutely awesome git ui that I can't stress enough is the best piece of software written in a long time. sounds like hyperbole but it's seriously so well made. doom emacs. press spacebar to get a menu of things you can do and you also get a bunch of vim stuff for free. I don't use emacs as a daily driver but I still use it exclusively for the magit mode for git. a caveat that you should be aware of is that you do need to learn a bit about emacs. what's a frame/buffer and how to kill them but that's not too bad.