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One reason I switched from Emacs was because it took longer to launch
I don't see this gets mentioned much but this is one of the larger reason I never use emacs. When quick editing files on remote servers, snappiness is really nice, even with bunch of plugins activated.
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I don't see this gets mentioned much but this is one of the larger reason I never use emacs. When quick editing files on remote servers, snappiness is really nice, even with bunch of plugins activated.
You use it wrong. You're supposed to keep your local emacs running and use tramp to login to the remote server. That way you still have your emacs config with you and don't have to load it again. What vim users don't seem to understand is: I never restart emacs. Mine stays running for weeks, even months at a time. When I change my emacs config I just run the code. I don't restart emacs.
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Completely anecdotally I've ever met two person who used Emacs and handful of people who use vim. At my current job I'm the only one who uses vim as my main tool, but collegue sitting next to me is the other Emacs user. Although some poeople have started to dabble in vim every now and then. I guess people just run into vim more often in the wild.
Relatedly, the emacs users I’ve met were 10+ years older than me (so far). Also, a huge number of other editors have vim keybindings as an option or plugin: intellij, eclipse, visual studio - the list goes on forever...
(try it yourself! If you're on a Mac, open the reply box in a browser that uses Mac-native controls, and start typing, then hit C-a or C-e or other readline key combos and see which ones work)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One reason I switched from Emacs was because it took longer to launch
I don't see this gets mentioned much but this is one of the larger reason I never use emacs. When quick editing files on remote servers, snappiness is really nice, even with bunch of plugins activated.
This is instant no matter how complicated your config. You can also edit remote files via tramp so you never have to leave your local emacs instance.
This means that the proper comparison is instant access to your customized instance with your plugins vs instant access to whatever environment you can sync with all machines you intend to access.
> While Emacs certainly still has a following, some people think that the Editor Wars are over and that Vim won.16 The 2018 Stack Overflow Developer Survey suggests that this is true; only 4.1% of respondents used Emacs. I'm an Emacs user for years now and love the editor. But I'm curious about this claim of its poor popularity. The article refers to a piece from http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Blogs/Off-the-Bea…
The majority of "vim users" are painful to watch using it solely in visual mode with arrow keys and pressing backspace like crazy when they want to delete something.
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Selection bias: the crowd on /r/linux is likely not representative.
Why not? Do Emacs users usually use other OS than Linux?
I wouldn't be surprised if a large part of Vim's current popularity stems from EDITOR=vim by default on many distros, despite often having emacs and always including nano. Even over a decade ago when I was in my early teens this seemed pretty common.
> While Emacs certainly still has a following, some people think that the Editor Wars are over and that Vim won.16 The 2018 Stack Overflow Developer Survey suggests that this is true; only 4.1% of respondents used Emacs. I'm an Emacs user for years now and love the editor. But I'm curious about this claim of its poor popularity. The article refers to a piece from http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Blogs/Off-the-Bea…
Very difficult to do with free software and completely irrelevant really. At some point in your life it's OK to accept that you're the weird one. We're the weird ones. Donald Knuth, Richard Stallman, Guido van Rossum, Rich Hickey et al are the weird ones. I don't know why emacs is such a barrier to everyone else or why vim is so attractive. But I don't understand most other humans about most things.
Vim works pretty well. It's simple enough to get by. But these days, I usually only use it for viewing mode. And maybe for some light editing.
For anything more complicated, then I just shell into the server, and open the file in a full featured text editor.
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Very difficult to do with free software and completely irrelevant really. At some point in your life it's OK to accept that you're the weird one. We're the weird ones. Donald Knuth, Richard Stallman, Guido van Rossum, Rich Hickey et al are the weird ones. I don't know why emacs is such a barrier to everyone else or why vim is so attractive. But I don't understand most other humans about most things.
As someone who came into all this "after" the editor wars and is now using Vim, these were what I understood were their selling points: - In Vim, you learn how shortcuts work and how they compose, and then you can apply them to a bunch of new situations and "guess" which other shortcuts apply. - Emacs can do a whole lot and you can customise it exactly to your liking. Oh, and it also supposedly works really well with…
So I started with vim. I also was drawn to the whole "composable shortcuts" thing. But I quickly realised that these key combinations were not shortcuts, rather the keyboard is the interface. I was completely sold on using the keyboard to edit text and wondered why on earth we ever forgot how to use it. The rat was banished.
What stopped me even trying to start using emacs was the lack of antialiased fonts. But I downloaded and built a pre-release with antialiasing and was able to try that too. I think it was the emacs concept of major modes that initially made so much sense to me. I then quickly discovered two "killer apps": org-mode and magit. That's how the only love affair I've ever had with software started. Within a few weeks I was learning Common Lisp thanks to being advised that it would make Emacs Lisp easier.
Saying Emacs is good for "customisation" is one of the grossest understatements that is so often repeated around the internet. It's repeated even by people who use Emacs and know better, but it's quite hard to describe what Emacs really is if you've never used it.
Emacs is deeply related to the Lisp way itself. Emacs isn't a text editor. Emacs is a Lisp environment that is particularly good for building tools related to text. Emacs is written using Lisp and Lisp is written using Emacs. Emacs users regularly use Emacs to extend to itself while it is running. Lisp users often talk about this moment of enlightenment that happens at some point when you learn Lisp. It's real and it happens when you learn Emacs as well.
But I feel a bit like someone trying to explain an LSD trip. You just have to see it for yourself. I didn't try Emacs because the above was attractive to me. I tried it because I wanted to learn a general purpose text editor and Emacs had great tools like org-mode and magit. The fact that I got to experience a kind of enlightenment and a feeling of love for software was pure luck.