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916 Days of Emacs

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Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#231

Post by vvillena »

kentosi wrote: post #129
pmoriarty wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like they're not even aware that it was an option. Many people don't realize that emacs' default keybindings can be changed to be modal in exactly the same as vim, by using evil.

Sorry for the naive question, but if you're changing all your bindings to vim, then why use emacs at all? Is there any extra functional difference?

Vi is like an standard for moving around and editing text files. I use Vi-style commands in all my editors: Emacs, IntelliJ, and VSCode. For me, any application that supports Vi keybindings and has some sort of command palette will feel like home.

Regarding why edit files in Emacs instead of vim: I simply work on Emacs. I don't use a CLI or a file manager to navigate to my files, I already have projects set up in Emacs and can quickly open files in any such projects. Emacs also holds my note taking system. And when I'm dealing with git, nothing comes close to magit. Also, I've been using the Spacemacs framework for years, which makes it really easy to create such a customized and efficient configuration without much hassle.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#232

Post by avindroth »

commandlinefan wrote: post #15

I've been a hardcore vi user pretty much my entire life, but I decided to force myself to spend a year using emacs a while back just to see what all the fuss was about. When the year was over and I "allowed" myself to return to vi, it was like a huge weight lifted off my shoulders... to this day I still don't see what the hype was about. On the plus side, though, I memorized the emacs cursor movement commands, which…

To each their own. Minds function differently, desire different workflows, and thus are extended better with different tools.

I use both non-evil emacs and neovim, given the mood I am feeling that day. For quick and dirty things, I prefer neovim, and for more extended workflows, I prefer emacs.

But besides functional differences, the two "mediums" feel different. Neovim is clean (and hangs less in general). No bloat. Emacs is a monster, suited towards my liking (with many years of .emacs config).

But as much as I love Lisp, sometimes you want to get away from the bloat and sit quietly with a blinking cursor in vim.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#233

Post by taeric »

commandlinefan wrote: post #181
pmoriarty wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"What I've noticed about emacs lovers is that they all customize it heavily - I didn't want to do that, since to me the point of using a plain text editor is that it's always available in exactly the same form wherever I happen to be. " So you not customize vim either? If you don't, you're missing out 99.999% of the greatness of both editors and doing yourself a huge disservice. It's like being a carpenter and limiti…

> you not customize vim No, and I have a specific reason - I ssh into remote boxes a lot , and I want the editor to work more or less the same wherever and whenever I use it. I guess I could customize vi to be a multi-purpose IDE but... that's what I have IntelliJ for.

That isn't a perfect reason to not customize your local editor. Most all allow opening remote files and shells. And simpler things like recently opened files can already be very convenient.

Simply put, IDE in the IDEA sense is not the only end goal. Such that that straw man is obnoxious.

Now, it is perfectly fine to just not want to. Such that I am not saying you should reconsider. Just don't be too proud of that reasoning.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#234

Post by avindroth »

LastNevadan wrote: post #98
commandlinefan wrote: post #15

I've been a hardcore vi user pretty much my entire life, but I decided to force myself to spend a year using emacs a while back just to see what all the fuss was about. When the year was over and I "allowed" myself to return to vi, it was like a huge weight lifted off my shoulders... to this day I still don't see what the hype was about. On the plus side, though, I memorized the emacs cursor movement commands, which…

When I was at the university and started programming on UNIX, the professor said we should try both emacs and vi and see which we like better, and provided links to some tutorials. I tried them both and liked vi. Emacs seemed slower. In my undergraduate wisdom, I deemed emacs to be "stupid" and went on with my life using vi. After I had been programming professionally for about ten years, I decided that my harsh judg…

After years of vim, I started using emacs with an ergonomic keyboard on my tower. Then I tried emacs with my mbp, and it was so much worse (ergonomically) than vim. I think emacs without ergonomic keyboard is just really painful.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#235

Post by nyarlathotep_ »

commandlinefan wrote: post #15

I've been a hardcore vi user pretty much my entire life, but I decided to force myself to spend a year using emacs a while back just to see what all the fuss was about. When the year was over and I "allowed" myself to return to vi, it was like a huge weight lifted off my shoulders... to this day I still don't see what the hype was about. On the plus side, though, I memorized the emacs cursor movement commands, which…

> which are (for some reason) the default cursor movement commands in most command line environments like the Postgres CLI.

AFAIK/IIRC these bindings are something to do with readline being widely used for CLI interfaces?

Additionally, they work all over OSX too (on text inputs), not just the shell--, for start and end of line, etc, probably lots of others too that I'm unaware of.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#236

Post by lenkite »

circuit wrote: post #39
commandlinefan wrote: post #15

I've been a hardcore vi user pretty much my entire life, but I decided to force myself to spend a year using emacs a while back just to see what all the fuss was about. When the year was over and I "allowed" myself to return to vi, it was like a huge weight lifted off my shoulders... to this day I still don't see what the hype was about. On the plus side, though, I memorized the emacs cursor movement commands, which…

I had a similar experience, but came to the opposite conclusion. I walked away replacing vim with emacs as my daily driver. Elisp is far more extensible than vimscript and evil-mode is pretty much at 1-1 feature parity with the real vim. I don't care much for the emacs movement keybindings except for the readline movement commands. > to this day I still don't see what the hype was about. Most of vim is written in C w…

Neovim supports Lua and Fennel (a Lisp atop Lua) https://fennel-lang.org/ https://github.com/Olical/aniseed

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#237

Post by chlorion »

slashdev wrote: post #158

Why do people still use emacs and vim in this age of VS code and intellij? I’ve heard plenty of arguments, but they kind of suck to be honest. They’re more like rationalizations for why they stick to what they know. I just don’t get it. Why use inferior tools? Both are lighter weight. Big deal, buy a faster computer. It’s nothing compared to your salary. Both may let you type slightly faster and move around faster. M…

Emacs is not about being lightweight or faster to type with, this seems to be a misconception that stems from it being compared with Vim. Emacs is not a modal editor, it works just like your standard text editor as far as typing and navigation go.

As for the other things, Emacs has support for many more languages than VSCode or Intellij. An example of this, is support for (g)awk, or non-posix shell scripts, lots of lisps, jq, various config file formats, and other things that aren't "hot" right now.

There are other reasons too, like Emacs being a true FOSS project, which is important to me. There are lots of other things, these are just a few ottomh.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#238

Post by matheusmoreira »

Blackthorn wrote: post #198
matheusmoreira wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Thank god for musl.

Software people are hilarious. Wow, I sure hate using this amazingly working and workable product because I don't like what the source code looks like! I'm so glad there's an alternative that looks prettier!

Hilarious, huh? For a free software project whose literal philosophy is the freedom to read and study the source code, they sure don't make it easy. They should improve that if they don't want people to thank god for the existence of musl. Whatever understanding of libc that I've got is thanks to musl.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#239

Post by vvillena »

softirq wrote: post #23
commandlinefan wrote: post #15

I've been a hardcore vi user pretty much my entire life, but I decided to force myself to spend a year using emacs a while back just to see what all the fuss was about. When the year was over and I "allowed" myself to return to vi, it was like a huge weight lifted off my shoulders... to this day I still don't see what the hype was about. On the plus side, though, I memorized the emacs cursor movement commands, which…

I did the same experiment and came to the same conclusion. There’s really nothing killer in Emacs that makes it a huge sell over just using vim which is a much better editor unless you just love Emacs lisp. Emacs also has some glaring issues - tramp being a major one. It’s slow and very unreliable. Vim is much more in line with the Unix philosophy. It’s a great editor that can be extended with fzf, ripgrep, lsps, git…

The strength of Emacs lies in customizing it to the user's needs. A clean installation of Emacs is not representative of what Emacs can be, but the various modern configuration frameworks such as Spacemacs and Doom Emacs offer a window into their creators' visions of what Emacs can be. And from there, it's easy to slowly transform their vision into your own.

These frameworks offer good defaults that lean towards having lots of features packed in, but it's easy to take away everything you don't want. Both Spacemacs and Doom Emacs can be stripped to almost nothing, leaving you with just a standard for organizing your custom configuration.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#240

Post by Blackthorn »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #238
Blackthorn wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software people are hilarious. Wow, I sure hate using this amazingly working and workable product because I don't like what the source code looks like! I'm so glad there's an alternative that looks prettier!

Hilarious, huh? For a free software project whose literal philosophy is the freedom to read and study the source code, they sure don't make it easy. They should improve that if they don't want people to thank god for the existence of musl. Whatever understanding of libc that I've got is thanks to musl.

Your own issues comprehending the source code do not change that the source code is free to read, free to study, and free for many other things. And also quite easy to find.

Or, as the kids these days like to put it, "skill issue tbh".

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