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I have at various times in my life tried to use vim or emacs. Each time I get comfortable enough in them to appreciate them but I run into the same problem ever

I have at various times in my life tried to use vim or emacs. Each time I get comfortable enough in them to appreciate them but I run into the same problem every single time: it is annoying to switch back out of them. I had an acquaintance that told how he had spent years investing in Dvorak. He came back to QWERTY because he got a job where he had to jump onto others computers on occasion. The friction he felt fighting against his muscle memory was more annoying than any benefit he got from the supposed better Dvorak layout. I now use VSCode for 90% of my stuff and I use vim whenever I ssh into boxes or if I really need a quick edit from the CLI. But I keep vim totally stock, not a single thing in my dot file. There are aspects of my previous highly-customized and personalized vim setup that I miss - but I am free from the frustration of them not being there. As I get older, freedom from frustration has become more important than the marginal improvements of customization for efficiency.

dingnuts 3y ago
Funny, you use VSCode for the same reason I use Emacs -- so I can keep vim totally stock, so I'll retain the muscle memory / not be shocked on other systems, and so that it remains completely reliable and fast on my own. I'm incredibly skeptical, however, that VSCode has as-good of a vim emulation layer as evil-mode. Evil-mode is just fantastic. Customized Emacs w/ evil-mode gives me everything I'd get from a fancy IDE, and keeps my vim muscle memory intact for those times when I am using regular vim. This has been my pattern for a decade and it's glorious. GLORIOUS, I tell you! Few things give me joy in computing like the balance in the Force that I've managed to strike between Emacs and vim
- imiric 3y ago
  For sure, Emacs with evil-mode is the best of both worlds: deep customization and sane configuration language of Emacs, with the arguably superior modal interface of Vim. Using mnemonic key bindings is much friendlier than dozens of random key combinations. There's a popular key-chord package[1] that minimizes this discomfort, but without editing modes, users need to be concerned with the chords clashing with their actual text, which is absurd. Modes address this issue gracefully. I still use some basic combinations like M-x, but I would be completely lost in Emacs if it weren't for evil-mode. <3 The thing with modal UIs is that you want to use them everywhere. So I also enable vi-mode in my shells, and in any application that uses readline. [1]: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/KeyChord https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/KeyChord
  - lawn 3y ago
    Honestly, configuring Neovim with Lua felt more sane than elisp for me.
  - SKWR-PLS 3y ago
    This is pretty close to how steno [https://www.openstenoproject.org/ https://www.openstenoproject.org/] works in practice and worth learning IMO if you are going to go this far. In fact I have a few emacs-specific chords, but not as many as you might think. The whole experience is a bit like if emacs is now your keyboard, so it happens to go great with emacs. [1]
- elcritch 3y ago
  There's two VSCode vim plugins, one a native one and the other actually uses neovim. They're both pretty good. The main downside is that VSCode plugin can take some time to startup. I use the native one as it's a little less "pure" about VIM and integrates better with VSCode things. Overall it's less evil than evil. ;)
imiric 3y ago
I never understood the logic of not using something because it's difficult to switch away from it. If I need to program, I just copy my Emacs configuration to that machine. I have never encountered a situation where I'm forced to use stock Emacs, or someone else's Emacs configuration. If I need to make a quick edit from the CLI, using plain Vim is fine, but I feel more "at home" with my own tweaks. None of these things are hurdles that would make me settle for an editor that someone else has preconfigured for me. At the end of the day, this will depend on how important you find customizing your working environment to your liking. If you're fine with someone else making that decision for you, you'd probably find the stock configuration, or someone else's configuration, acceptable. If OTOH you have strong opinions about the way you want to use your editor, then the time and effort invested in configuring it and managing that configuration is not an issue. This goes beyond just text editors, and applies to computing in general. Some people are fine with using stock software as it comes from the manufacturer. Most software, in fact, is not deeply configurable. Apple devices and software are wildly popular despite lacking configuration. But the reason we choose operating systems like Linux, and text editors like Vim and Emacs is precisely because they give us the freedom to use our computers in the way we want to use them, not as someone else thinks we ought to.

dingnuts 3y ago

Funny, you use VSCode for the same reason I use Emacs -- so I can keep vim totally stock, so I'll retain the muscle memory / not be shocked on other systems, and so that it remains completely reliable and fast on my own. I'm incredibly skeptical, however, that VSCode has as-good of a vim emulation layer as evil-mode. Evil-mode is just fantastic. Customized Emacs w/ evil-mode gives me everything I'd get from a fancy IDE, and keeps my vim muscle memory intact for those times when I am using regular vim. This has been my pattern for a decade and it's glorious. GLORIOUS, I tell you! Few things give me joy in computing like the balance in the Force that I've managed to strike between Emacs and vim

imiric 3y ago
For sure, Emacs with evil-mode is the best of both worlds: deep customization and sane configuration language of Emacs, with the arguably superior modal interface of Vim. Using mnemonic key bindings is much friendlier than dozens of random key combinations. There's a popular key-chord package[1] that minimizes this discomfort, but without editing modes, users need to be concerned with the chords clashing with their actual text, which is absurd. Modes address this issue gracefully. I still use some basic combinations like M-x, but I would be completely lost in Emacs if it weren't for evil-mode. <3 The thing with modal UIs is that you want to use them everywhere. So I also enable vi-mode in my shells, and in any application that uses readline. [1]: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/KeyChord https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/KeyChord
- lawn 3y ago
  Honestly, configuring Neovim with Lua felt more sane than elisp for me.
- SKWR-PLS 3y ago
  This is pretty close to how steno [https://www.openstenoproject.org/ https://www.openstenoproject.org/] works in practice and worth learning IMO if you are going to go this far. In fact I have a few emacs-specific chords, but not as many as you might think. The whole experience is a bit like if emacs is now your keyboard, so it happens to go great with emacs. [1]
elcritch 3y ago
There's two VSCode vim plugins, one a native one and the other actually uses neovim. They're both pretty good. The main downside is that VSCode plugin can take some time to startup. I use the native one as it's a little less "pure" about VIM and integrates better with VSCode things. Overall it's less evil than evil. ;)

imiric 3y ago

I never understood the logic of not using something because it's difficult to switch away from it. If I need to program, I just copy my Emacs configuration to that machine. I have never encountered a situation where I'm forced to use stock Emacs, or someone else's Emacs configuration. If I need to make a quick edit from the CLI, using plain Vim is fine, but I feel more "at home" with my own tweaks. None of these things are hurdles that would make me settle for an editor that someone else has preconfigured for me. At the end of the day, this will depend on how important you find customizing your working environment to your liking. If you're fine with someone else making that decision for you, you'd probably find the stock configuration, or someone else's configuration, acceptable. If OTOH you have strong opinions about the way you want to use your editor, then the time and effort invested in configuring it and managing that configuration is not an issue. This goes beyond just text editors, and applies to computing in general. Some people are fine with using stock software as it comes from the manufacturer. Most software, in fact, is not deeply configurable. Apple devices and software are wildly popular despite lacking configuration. But the reason we choose operating systems like Linux, and text editors like Vim and Emacs is precisely because they give us the freedom to use our computers in the way we want to use them, not as someone else thinks we ought to.