4 ms·

How do you surf the web in vim? How do you read email, RSS news, and usenet with vim? Does vim have a chat client as powerful as ERC? Mainly, though, is vim

How do you surf the web in vim? How do you read email, RSS news, and usenet with vim? Does vim have a chat client as powerful as ERC? Mainly, though, is vim programmed in and extended through a lisp, and does it have an entire lisp ecosystem built around it? Don't get me wrong, I love vim, and used it and vi for 25 years before switching to emacs. But my emacs can do far, far more than vim ever did... and there's no way I'll be switching back until it has all the above and more.

papaver 4y ago
seems weird to me that one would want to do any of these things inside vim... though it should be possible with the right plugins... but why? just use a window manager like screen or tmux to multi-task.
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  It's because of the tight integration with the rest of the editor and all the rest of the packages that I use. For example, when I go to edit an email I don't have to start up an external editor, so there is no context switching. Also, as emacs is super powerful, the editor that I use to edit my emails is super powerful, unlike the editors in most other mail clients. Copying and pasting or importing/exporting between the various packages and other emacs buffers that I use is also seamless unlike anything that you do between conventional, separate applications. Everywhere that I go within emacs and everything that I do has the full power of emacs to do it with. I have macros, snippets, and elisp (to name just a few) at my fingertips. Another advantage is that all these packages that I use (email, my git interface, RSS reader, etc) are all written in elisp and are integrated using elisp, so if you know elisp (which I do) it's easy to modify them to your liking, and have them do exactly what you want. This makes the whole experience super customizable to an extent unmatched pretty much anywhere else. Without such integration and customizability, virtually all other software that I've used seems primitive and rigid by comparison. So, yeah, it makes a big difference.
- ParetoOptimal 4y ago
  > seems weird to me that one would want to do any of these things inside vim... though it should be possible with the right plugins... but why? just use a window manager like screen or tmux to multi-task. Imagine you put tons of information in vimwiki from your browser. It's not a far stretch to wish you had a text browser inside of vim to more easily get important information into vim wiki. At some point the browser could even begin to feel like a hindrance to curating and improving upon your higher quality vimwiki notes. Emacs is like this, but not just for notes... for pretty much everything. > just use a window manager like screen or tmux to multi-task. I'm quite used to my auto-completion and snippets in emacs. As well as my clipboard history. The flexibility of isearch and how intuitive it's UX is. If I leave emacs I never have all of those familiar things that fit like a glove. I'm in a different world with different rules that is far less malleable, understandable, and introspectable as emacs. Hopefully that helps make sense of things a bit =)
veilrap 4y ago
I think this sort of defense of EMacs misses a key point: most people have no interest in running a browser, email, chat, etc. from within their text editor. Generally people prefer to do those sorts of things with specialized applications that are more tailored towards those individual use cases.
- throwawaysalome 4y ago
  Alas, living in emacs can't be appreciated until you get good at emacs. More than the "one-stop-shop" aspect of it, there's the "everything is a buffer of manipulable text" aspect which, again, can't be appreciated until you make the leap of faith.

papaver 4y ago

seems weird to me that one would want to do any of these things inside vim... though it should be possible with the right plugins... but why? just use a window manager like screen or tmux to multi-task.

pmoriarty 4y ago
It's because of the tight integration with the rest of the editor and all the rest of the packages that I use. For example, when I go to edit an email I don't have to start up an external editor, so there is no context switching. Also, as emacs is super powerful, the editor that I use to edit my emails is super powerful, unlike the editors in most other mail clients. Copying and pasting or importing/exporting between the various packages and other emacs buffers that I use is also seamless unlike anything that you do between conventional, separate applications. Everywhere that I go within emacs and everything that I do has the full power of emacs to do it with. I have macros, snippets, and elisp (to name just a few) at my fingertips. Another advantage is that all these packages that I use (email, my git interface, RSS reader, etc) are all written in elisp and are integrated using elisp, so if you know elisp (which I do) it's easy to modify them to your liking, and have them do exactly what you want. This makes the whole experience super customizable to an extent unmatched pretty much anywhere else. Without such integration and customizability, virtually all other software that I've used seems primitive and rigid by comparison. So, yeah, it makes a big difference.
ParetoOptimal 4y ago
> seems weird to me that one would want to do any of these things inside vim... though it should be possible with the right plugins... but why? just use a window manager like screen or tmux to multi-task. Imagine you put tons of information in vimwiki from your browser. It's not a far stretch to wish you had a text browser inside of vim to more easily get important information into vim wiki. At some point the browser could even begin to feel like a hindrance to curating and improving upon your higher quality vimwiki notes. Emacs is like this, but not just for notes... for pretty much everything. > just use a window manager like screen or tmux to multi-task. I'm quite used to my auto-completion and snippets in emacs. As well as my clipboard history. The flexibility of isearch and how intuitive it's UX is. If I leave emacs I never have all of those familiar things that fit like a glove. I'm in a different world with different rules that is far less malleable, understandable, and introspectable as emacs. Hopefully that helps make sense of things a bit =)

veilrap 4y ago

I think this sort of defense of EMacs misses a key point: most people have no interest in running a browser, email, chat, etc. from within their text editor. Generally people prefer to do those sorts of things with specialized applications that are more tailored towards those individual use cases.

throwawaysalome 4y ago
Alas, living in emacs can't be appreciated until you get good at emacs. More than the "one-stop-shop" aspect of it, there's the "everything is a buffer of manipulable text" aspect which, again, can't be appreciated until you make the leap of faith.