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From Vim to Emacs

juanjoalvarez.net

11–20 of 123 posts

Re: From Vim to Emacs

#11
post #8

I began using Vim about a month ago and it has been totally revelatory to me, and believe quite honestly that it was the best career decision I've ever made. The one thing, however, is its speed. MacVim gets very slow sometimes, particularly with buffers. So my question: How does Emacs and Vim compare speed-wise? I come from a Sublime Text background and really miss the ability to quickly navigate between tabs (buffe…

I've been using MacVim for close to 3 years now w/o any slowness, CtrlP (plugin) sometimes gets buggy with large projects but aside from that buffer navigation is always good, but then again I'm running on SSD and maxed out ram on my mbp.

I also use Janus https://github.com/carlhuda/janus so i might be a victim of improvements made by them.

Speed is the #1 reason I switched to Vim

Re: From Vim to Emacs

#12
post #8

I began using Vim about a month ago and it has been totally revelatory to me, and believe quite honestly that it was the best career decision I've ever made. The one thing, however, is its speed. MacVim gets very slow sometimes, particularly with buffers. So my question: How does Emacs and Vim compare speed-wise? I come from a Sublime Text background and really miss the ability to quickly navigate between tabs (buffe…

> it was the best career decision I've ever made

I hear this a lot, and I'm not debating whether it's true or not since ymmv. I'm curious if anyone here has gone the other way.

I used vi in my teens then switched to emacs, which I used for over a decade. A couple years ago I switched to JetBrains IDEs and have never been happier. I hadn't used an IDE since Borland Turbo C, and forgot what I was missing.

Are there any other former vi/emacs users (like, hardcore - I used to browse the web in emacs) who ditched it for an IDE?

I found that the mouse really wasn't a productivity killer for the few times you need to use it in a modern IDE.

Re: From Vim to Emacs

#13
post #8

I began using Vim about a month ago and it has been totally revelatory to me, and believe quite honestly that it was the best career decision I've ever made. The one thing, however, is its speed. MacVim gets very slow sometimes, particularly with buffers. So my question: How does Emacs and Vim compare speed-wise? I come from a Sublime Text background and really miss the ability to quickly navigate between tabs (buffe…

Try terminal Vim. I don't use MacVim and have very few issues with sluggishness.

Re: From Vim to Emacs

#14
post #8

I began using Vim about a month ago and it has been totally revelatory to me, and believe quite honestly that it was the best career decision I've ever made. The one thing, however, is its speed. MacVim gets very slow sometimes, particularly with buffers. So my question: How does Emacs and Vim compare speed-wise? I come from a Sublime Text background and really miss the ability to quickly navigate between tabs (buffe…

There's no normal workload under which Vim should ever slow down noticeably. I routinely have long-lived Vim instances with hundreds of open buffers, and some of the files can be quite healthily sized (tens of thousands of lines). It should even be fine for "pathological" cases (multi-megabyte log files, files with stupidly long lines etc).

Re: From Vim to Emacs

#15
post #14
post #8

I began using Vim about a month ago and it has been totally revelatory to me, and believe quite honestly that it was the best career decision I've ever made. The one thing, however, is its speed. MacVim gets very slow sometimes, particularly with buffers. So my question: How does Emacs and Vim compare speed-wise? I come from a Sublime Text background and really miss the ability to quickly navigate between tabs (buffe…

There's no normal workload under which Vim should ever slow down noticeably. I routinely have long-lived Vim instances with hundreds of open buffers, and some of the files can be quite healthily sized (tens of thousands of lines). It should even be fine for "pathological" cases (multi-megabyte log files, files with stupidly long lines etc).

I've been wondering lately if it has something to do with Airline. I'm using its visible buffer display and when doing C-movement s between buffers it feels so terribly laggy (on a top of the line MB Pro).

When switching via ctrlp everything is instantaneous, but that requires more commands than just C-k or C-j.

Re: From Vim to Emacs

#16
post #8

I began using Vim about a month ago and it has been totally revelatory to me, and believe quite honestly that it was the best career decision I've ever made. The one thing, however, is its speed. MacVim gets very slow sometimes, particularly with buffers. So my question: How does Emacs and Vim compare speed-wise? I come from a Sublime Text background and really miss the ability to quickly navigate between tabs (buffe…

Try terminal Vim. I don't use MacVim and have very few issues with sluggishness.

I started with terminal Vim, began having issues with redraws, and made the switch. I find that MacVim is faster and more stable.

Re: From Vim to Emacs

#17
I used Emacs for 4 years in school and was pretty comfortable with it. Couldn't use it when I was logged on to some server at my first job. Picked up vim .. use vimperator on firefox. Been using it for over a decade now.

Re: From Vim to Emacs

#19

As someone who has always used vim, what are the benefits of this system over a standard vim installation?

You get a computing environment which "breathes" Lisp[1] and is itself mostly built up from a fully hackable Lisp codebase. I can highly recommend Bozhidar Batsov's Emacs Prelude [2] as a nice foundation for building a personalized configuration. Just fork it and put your personal .el files under the "personal" subdirectory; then "git fetch ... && git merge" to keep up to date with improvements committed to the autho…

I disagree re: forking it, I think there's a lot of stuff that continues to be a bit of a pain to manage, but it's a good first start.

I think my approach re: prelude is a bit cleaner. See this: https://github.com/mahmoudimus/.emacs.d

This allows an easy to back up to github while still maintaining easy update access to prelude.

Re: From Vim to Emacs

#20
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try terminal Vim. I don't use MacVim and have very few issues with sluggishness.

I started with terminal Vim, began having issues with redraws, and made the switch. I find that MacVim is faster and more stable.

MacVim is faster, except when it's not? :P

I wonder if the redraw issues were the fault of your terminal emulator rather than vim. I don't have a lot of MacOS experience, though.

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