Ask HN: How to become good at Emacs/Vim? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How to become good at Emacs/Vim?

#81

Post by avean » Sun, Oct 16, 2022, 8:59 AM UTC

aussiesnack wrote: post #15

A couple of suggestions (in no particular order, and from an ex-Emacs/Xcode/Jetbrains/VSCode and current nvim user): 1. Don't. There's no need to 'switch'. There are marvellously 'productive' developers using every editor under the sun, and neither the quality nor quantity of their work is strongly related to their choice of editor. There are world-class developers who do everything in a vanilla Sublime Text. Others…

I can only confirm this. Only change if you feel real need and progress with another tool. Learning a new IDE takes time. I've been using Emacs for over 20 years and I'm still discovering new features. The goal is not to become an Emacs superhero but to gain confidence and efficiency. Some features may seem useless to you until you have a suitable use for them. For example, for a long time I ignored Emacs' natural keyboard shortcuts for moving the cursor, preferring to use the arrow keys until I felt the need to use them and felt that I was doing my job more efficiently.

I tried VS Code as well but did not enjoy the experience. Back to Emacs with which I have too many habits and a long love affair. I also use Atom a bit for some tasks but it's more rare.

You also don't need to configure your IDE from the start. It's a bit of a thankless task but not that difficult or incomprehensible. It took me a few years before I started messing with my Emacs configuration. The advantage is that it is portable and I can find my environment on any computer just by copying a folder.

Re: Ask HN: How to become good at Emacs/Vim?

#82

Post by xtiansimon » Sun, Oct 16, 2022, 12:28 PM UTC

Drazurh wrote: post #2

I think what I did was just force myself to use it and if there was something in particular I wanted to do I would look it up, or if there was something that I was doing repeatedly I would try to find how to do it in the lowest number of keystrokes. After I got the basic movements down (doing vimtutor if I needed refresher), then I would watch videos on youtube of peoples favourite keybinds, or lesser known keybinds.…

This is similar to my experience. I forced myself to use vim on non-coding text files first. Just the basics of vimtutor. Only later, after learning to organize my vimrc configs, and adding useful plugins, did I use vim for coding.

Re: Ask HN: How to become good at Emacs/Vim?

#83

Post by dezzadk » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 5:43 PM UTC

1. Write cheatsheet while you learn.

2. Hang out in #vim :)

Re: Ask HN: How to become good at Emacs/Vim?

#84

Post by stevebmark » Thu, Oct 20, 2022, 2:22 AM UTC

jstx1 wrote: post #30

stevebmark wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The well known “Vim mode paradox”: if you like the Vim mode provided by another editor, it means you don’t know Vim well enough to justify using Vim nor Vim mode. Vim modes don’t approach even 10% of the Vim features you need to reach the bare minimum of efficient editing.

> Vim modes don’t approach even 10% of the Vim features you need to reach the bare minimum of efficient editing. What's the 90% that's not available in VSCode with the Vim extension?

Still trying it, no `:norm`, no `:g`, multiple cursors in VSCode are so much more powerful than this, and already do 90% of what you want to do in Vim in the first place.