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Yup. Remapping Caps Lock is kind of a shibboleth for Vim/Emacs users. Emacs users remap to CTRL; I hear Vim users remap to ESC.
Vim users do indeed. I still get a bit of ESC pinky, but not nearly as bad as the default layout would cause.
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OTOH, emacs has TRAMP which allows you to edit files remotely, using ftp or ssh as the transport layer. (Okay, I do not use that feature often, and I do still use vi sometimes for quickly editing a config file or something).
A normal sysadmin workflow would be, log in via ssh, poke at some log files, run a couple of commands, edit a config file, restart a service, check the logs again, logout. If you need to be ssh'd in anyway to run commands then being able to edit a file remotely is of limited value. I actually really like emacs, for a while I used it as my login shell (no x-windows and with e-shell providing a command line), and elisp…
The number of Unixoid systems I have to take care of is sufficiently small that installing emacs on all of them is no big deal. I usually start an emacs daemon after booting and use emacsclient to fire up an editor, which is almost instantaneously.
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This is, in fact, the story behind Lisp Machines. Unfortunately, humans quickly forgot the lessons from the aliens, and made computing the mess it is today. The history is documented here: http://landoflisp.com/ (scroll down and follow the arrows).
Relevant XKCD https://xkcd.com/224/
> 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…
My personal journey. My first editor was vi. Then I learned about emacs and used it for a few years. But I still had to use vi when I logged in remote machines that didn't have emacs. When vim came a long, it was almost as good as emacs and I could use it everywhere. Conclusion: vi/vim was everywhere already. Now days I use sublime. I still use vi/vim when using *nix servers.
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> every time I've tried to spend serious time in Emacs over the past 30 years on a PC or Mac keyboard, I've ended up with stabbing pains in my wrists within a week I used to think "emacs pinky" was a joke, but it is real. Eventually I learned how to re-map Caps Lock to be a Ctrl-key (I never used Caps Lock anyway), and Caps Lock is far more comfortable to reach with my pinky than either of the regular Ctrl-keys.
Yup. Remapping Caps Lock is kind of a shibboleth for Vim/Emacs users. Emacs users remap to CTRL; I hear Vim users remap to ESC.
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As great as that is, though, they're all advantages that won't become relevant until you've really learned emacs, and won't become really advantageous unless you're comfortable enough with emacs that you're willing to commit to it. In other words, its not stuff that's going to drive adoption. The ggp has a point about emacs having a higher barrier to entry for complete beginners.
But having to spend a lot of time getting familiar with some tool, language or framework is not unusual in IT/Programming. Think of C++, or the .Net framework. When programming in C#, I spend at least 1/3 of my time browsing the API documentation or StackOverflow, TechNet, etc. With emacs, as with C++ or .Net, the idea is that the effort to get familiar with the environment pays off big time after a certain point. If…
I'm also inclined to say that, unless you work in a Windows shop, there really isn't any either-or to it. vim is, at this point, so pervasive that I think the real alternatives are either "just vim" or "emacs and at least a little bit of vim".
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But having to spend a lot of time getting familiar with some tool, language or framework is not unusual in IT/Programming. Think of C++, or the .Net framework. When programming in C#, I spend at least 1/3 of my time browsing the API documentation or StackOverflow, TechNet, etc. With emacs, as with C++ or .Net, the idea is that the effort to get familiar with the environment pays off big time after a certain point. If…
Fair, though, I think the story is a bit different with editors. Ultimately they're just a means to an end (editing code), and it's obviously true that plenty of people are able to work successfully with either of them, so you can't really fault people for just picking one to learn and going with it. Learning both intimately enough to make a serious comparison is a time-consuming prospect. I'm also inclined to say th…
I do not. Maybe I was not clear enough, but I made the point in another comment that I totally understand why somebody would choose vim and never look back. I used vim as my editor of choice for a couple of years, and I cannot deny that it is an excellent editor. I still use some flavor of vi on a regular basis, even on OpenBSD, where mg (a lightweight editor that copies emacs' default keybindings) is part of the base system.
> 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…
I can't stand IDEs. I understand their benefits, but the amount of resources they take up appall me at some deep level. I'll use them and grumble if I need to. I haven't really liked an IDE since the Turbo Pascal 4.0 days. I also have a thing about not liking software that tries to second-guess me. I'll take a vim session loaded with files and another terminal window to build the project in and I'm golden. Of course, I'm not working on huge projects for the most part. Maybe it's an old-person thing.
Though e-lisp is great and I appreciate the power and regularity of Emacs, Vi(m)'s mode-full, default cmd-mode editing that doesn't require ctrl + meta + esc left_foot_pedal + wink-wink-nudge-nudge... seems so much nicer to me than insert-by-default editing - thank goodness there are vim plugins everywhere. The TRS-80 Level II line editor was very much in the spirit of "em", along with other BASICs of the day. And pe…
I'm always kind of curious about comments like this -- it seems everybody knows you have to play games of Twister and hit twelve control keys simultaneously to do even the most basic things in Emacs. But... I use Emacs. I've been using it for almost twenty years. And I'm struggling to think of anything I use regularly the involves hitting more than two total keys simultaneously (keys pressed in sequence obviously don…
Search and replace with regular expressions takes 4 keys in the default bindings! The command query-replace-regexp is bound to C-M-%, which means ctrl+alt+shift+5 on most keyboards. (To be fair, you can also replace alt with previously pressing esc, so "esc then ctrl+shift+5".)