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So has anyone ever been a die-hard vim user, been absolutely seduced by Emacs and the wealth of things that go with it (IRC? Org mode? Holy crap!), tried to use it, and been completely turned off by the abundance of control keys? This describes me. I really, really want to like Emacs and learn to use it, but coming from vim, such heavy use of the meta keys just feels wrong .
So has anyone ever been a die-hard vim user, been absolutely seduced by Emacs and the wealth of things that go with it (IRC? Org mode? Holy crap!), tried to use it, and been completely turned off by the abundance of control keys? This describes me. I really, really want to like Emacs and learn to use it, but coming from vim, such heavy use of the meta keys just feels wrong .
So has anyone ever been a die-hard vim user, been absolutely seduced by Emacs and the wealth of things that go with it (IRC? Org mode? Holy crap!), tried to use it, and been completely turned off by the abundance of control keys? This describes me. I really, really want to like Emacs and learn to use it, but coming from vim, such heavy use of the meta keys just feels wrong .
Yep, but I managed with viper and vimpulse [1] which give vim bindings in emacs. You can have your cake and eat it too :) [1] http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs-es/Vimpulse
I tried emacs with viper and vimpulse recently, and found that while they did make emacs a lot less painful, they were a far cry from making a long-time vim user comfortable in emacs.
The biggest problem is that in order to configure emacs and bind functions to keys you have to invest a lot of time in reading documentation and finding out about emacs.
If you have that sort of time to invest, great. But I didn't, especially since I already know vim very well and feel completely comfortable using and configuring it. Switching to emacs just didn't seem worth the time investment in my particular case.
I have heard that evil was a better vim emulation mode for emacs, and I've been meaning to give it a try, but haven't gotten around to it yet -- and I'm still skeptical of it addressing my main concern, which is that to really use emacs effectively (even in vim emulation mode) you'd have to invest a lot of time in learning the emacsy parts.
There is one other major issue that none of emacs' vim emulation modes address, which is the thousands of vim plugins available on www.vim.org. You might, in the best case, get all the standard vim keybindings for emacs, but you'd still be forced to use emacs scripts and plugins, instead of the vim scripts and plugins you like and are used to. Learning and transitioning to those is yet another big time sink right there.
One of the main reasons that I switched to emacs was to use SLIME to interface with Common Lisp. But SLIME is a huge program, and learning to use it and configure viper/vimpulse to bind keyboard shortcuts to its functions requires spending a lot of time learning about and understanding SLIME. It's just so much simpler to one of the less feature-rich vim plugins to develop code in CL. Yes, you'd miss out on some great SLIME features, but you would also not have to spend a ton of time learning SLIME and configuring viper/vimpulse to work with it.
I used to use Vim, and then I got a job after college working with .NET (this was in 2003). Since then I've used Visual Studio as my primary IDE. Its features (or that of Eclipse) seem to (pardon the pun) eclipse the crap out of Vim. The contextual information you get in VS by hovering your mouse on any variable, the built-in debugging, etc. Studio isn't a just text editor, it actually understands the semantics of yo…
And that is why VisualStudio is considered an IDE rather than an editor. As with the rest of the *nix toolkit, the philosophy with Vi(m) is to do one simple thing (editing) and do it really really well, for better or worse. I think this exemplifies this: http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/tips.html#shell-window
I'm usually one to complain of the opposite, but 21px is quite an exaggeration for body text, isn't it? Limiting body width to ~800px would help too.
So has anyone ever been a die-hard vim user, been absolutely seduced by Emacs and the wealth of things that go with it (IRC? Org mode? Holy crap!), tried to use it, and been completely turned off by the abundance of control keys? This describes me. I really, really want to like Emacs and learn to use it, but coming from vim, such heavy use of the meta keys just feels wrong .
With that said I'm trying to use emacs org mode to keep myself organized, which works great! But I would never trade it with vim as my code editor, not in a million years. Sorry.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, but I managed with viper and vimpulse [1] which give vim bindings in emacs. You can have your cake and eat it too :) [1] http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs-es/Vimpulse
I'm a die-hard vim user, who's used vim for many years. I tried emacs with viper and vimpulse recently, and found that while they did make emacs a lot less painful, they were a far cry from making a long-time vim user comfortable in emacs. The biggest problem is that in order to configure emacs and bind functions to keys you have to invest a lot of time in reading documentation and finding out about emacs. If you hav…
It's true though that if you're heavily invested in vim plugins there's fair time sink in getting up to speed on the emacs equivalents. Everything's a tradeoff.
So has anyone ever been a die-hard vim user, been absolutely seduced by Emacs and the wealth of things that go with it (IRC? Org mode? Holy crap!), tried to use it, and been completely turned off by the abundance of control keys? This describes me. I really, really want to like Emacs and learn to use it, but coming from vim, such heavy use of the meta keys just feels wrong .
Still, unless you start using a vi emulation mode or keychords.el you will always be stuck with the meta keys. For me this was no problem since vi's modal approach to editing always rubbed me the wrong way. (I used Vim for almost 10 years before making the switch to Emacs.)
Right now left is :bp and right is :bn to move through my active buffer.
Am I really supposed to believe that my time is better spent learning an editor than it is spent getting better at programming?
I honestly feel that learning these editors has more to do with gaining status than it does self-improvement.
Why should I have to spend hours consciously learning an /editor/. It's /just/ an editor, the interface should be good enough that I can just walk in and use it productively from the start.
For the record, I used vim for the first 2 years of my degree, now I use gedit. It certainly lacks some functionality, but it's generally good enough and feels like much less of a burden to carry: I'm free to focus on actual work.