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From Vim to Emacs

juanjoalvarez.net

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Re: From Vim to Emacs

#91

Post by cschmidt »

chongli wrote: post #86
barclay wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Old (old) school vi user here. When I was working at a .net shop, VS became my vim (mostly because it was already always running), also because it was incredibly familiar. Since leaving the .net world though, I've relapsed. Have had trouble with eclipse|intelli-j|etc due to their general java slugishness on the mac.

Nice, I looooove old school vi. O'Reilly's book on vi: Mastering the vi editor: 6th edition is my bible. I wish there were other sources of information and tips for vi. I really want to know what sort of workflows other people have.

I haven't read it myself, but Practical Vim is quite highly regarded:

http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Vim-Thought-Pragmatic-Progra...

A whole book of tips

Re: From Vim to Emacs

#92

Post by notfoss »

endlessvoid94 wrote: post #70
paufernandez wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the other guy?

Good question! He switched to vim due to RSI I believe. Conclusion: neither is better. I think.

And you switched to emacs due to RMS ;)

Jokes aside, during the 1 or 2 weeks that I forced myself to use emacs (a few years back), I felt that I would get RSI because of the painful default keybindings. Of course, I didn't know of evil back then, so I returned back to using vim.

Re: From Vim to Emacs

#93

Post by pjmlp »

brandonmenc wrote: post #12
cnp wrote: 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…

> Are there any other former vi/emacs users

Yes!

I also started my IDE days back in Turbo Pascal. Used most of the Turbo Pascal, C and C++ versions of Borland products up to Delphi early versions.

Thanks to some friends I also knew from seeing, not really used them, a few Amiga IDEs like DevPac.

When I started using UNIX, initially Xenix followed bz DG/UX and many others, vi was all there was available to us.

Eventually I found Emacs and it became my UNIX editor between 1996 and 2005. With vi playing the fireman role when nothing else was installed.

However UNIX wasn't the only system were I had to work on. So I became acquainted with Smalltalk and Oberon environments as well.

In the end, I kept always looking to replicate IDE experiences on UNIX systems. But never found one at the same level of experience than what the PC world had to offer me.

As my work became more focused in JVM and .NET land, I left Emacs.

Emacs might have been a great editor back in the day, but IDEs have so much to offer. Even if one can spend weeks coding ELisp code for the said functionalists they aren't as well polished nor as functional as what IDEs offer out of the box.

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

If one masters IDE shortcuts + mouse, I feel productivity is like playing a FPS against someone just using the keyboard.

Re: From Vim to Emacs

#94

Post by mercurial »

Sirenos wrote: post #88
erikb wrote: post #85

I always have a hard time figuring out why people would switch from one tool to another just to start configuring the other to behave like the original tool. Can someone name some reasons to switch from vim to a vim-like configured Emacs? The reason I've seen mentioned by the author is to learn the other tool, in this case Emacs. But for that I think the smarter way would be to learn to use Emacs like Emacs users do…

Emacs isn't superior to Vim in every possible way. I personally find Vim's modal editing hard to let go of. On the other hand, vimscript is an atrocity compared to Elisp. Vimmers have certainly managed to make some amazing extensions to the editor despite that fact, but no tool is perfect; the whole point of an extension layer is to make the tool work the way you want. The defaults aren't necessarily what everyone li…

This may change with Neovim, though, since add-ons will, as far as I understand, exist separately and do IPC through JSON.

Re: From Vim to Emacs

#95

Post by mercurial »

aerique wrote: post #68
millstone wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not the person to whom you replied, but the feature I use most often in Xcode is Go To Definition (with command-click). This integrates with clang, so it knows how to navigate templates, overloads, etc. It also integrates with the build system, so it knows the correct header search paths, preprocessor macros, etc. I imagine there are some plugins available for vi and emacs that try to provide these features, but…

Whether they work as reliably depends on the language. Emacs + Slime for Common Lisp is fine. Nowadays there's luckily a lot of editor / IDE independent tools like Jedi, ycmd, eclim which improves the situation for Emacs and Vim considerably. C++ has always been had issues but for me it's good enough especially since I move between languages and OSes a lot. If I was just doing C# on Windows I would probably use an ID…

I find that it depends on what kind of languages you work in. Boilerplate-y languages like Java require way too much hand-holding to be nice to do in an editor. On the other hand, Haskell/OCaml in Vim are fairly nice with the right plugins, as long as you don't mind refactoring via sed.

Re: From Vim to Emacs

#96

Post by mercurial »

erikb wrote: post #85

I always have a hard time figuring out why people would switch from one tool to another just to start configuring the other to behave like the original tool. Can someone name some reasons to switch from vim to a vim-like configured Emacs? The reason I've seen mentioned by the author is to learn the other tool, in this case Emacs. But for that I think the smarter way would be to learn to use Emacs like Emacs users do…

> Can someone name some reasons to switch from vim to a vim-like configured Emacs?

You're attached to modal editing but you want some of the Emacs plugins and a less terrible scripting language.

Re: From Vim to Emacs

#98

Post by falcolas »

clarry wrote: post #87
chongli wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? vi does not have any plugins; only vim. vi is even more bare-bones than vim, lacking a lot of features (macro recording and text objects being the ones I miss). It is extremely common to find vi pre-installed on countless servers, however, making it extremely convenient if you're an expert with it. What's amusing to me is how many people don't know vi very well and use plugins in vim that vi can handle as well o…

This bothers me. People should just call it vim when they mean vim. I suspect most people here haven't actually touched Joy's vi or its closest derivative, nvi. I don't know where this practice comes from but it feels exactly the same as when people say Unix when they are very obviously talking about GNU/Linux.

It probably comes from the fact that most people alias vi to vim. And from the fact that when you type vi, you're probably not getting vi, but vim in full compatibility mode.

These actions make the two interchangeable in people's minds.

Re: From Vim to Emacs

#99

Post by splawn »

erikb wrote: post #85

I always have a hard time figuring out why people would switch from one tool to another just to start configuring the other to behave like the original tool. Can someone name some reasons to switch from vim to a vim-like configured Emacs? The reason I've seen mentioned by the author is to learn the other tool, in this case Emacs. But for that I think the smarter way would be to learn to use Emacs like Emacs users do…

Emacs is easier to customize. I used vim for 10 years before switching last year to emacs + evil. After a month I felt more comfortable in elisp than I ever was in vimscript. If you use terminals within emacs you can navigate and search through all the text as if it were in a vim buffer, imo a step above readline's vim mode. If you are comfortable with vim modal editing you must try emacs with evil, you get much bang for your "buck". I would also argue that even though you are using vim bindings with evil doing so is actually how emacs users would do it. I say that because the emacs way seems to be to customize it until you are comfortable.

Re: From Vim to Emacs

#100

Post by Tenhundfeld »

mattvvhat wrote: post #60
mattvvhat wrote: post #59

yo why is anyone reading this kind of shit

-_- seriously how much can we talk about vim and emacs

I think you're just trolling, but I'll respond as if you're sincere.

Software developers spend hours every day writing code, dozens of hours each week, hundreds of hours each year. It's only natural to care about the tools you spend hundreds and thousands of hours using.

We talk about vim and emacs so much because they are the most powerful popular editors, in terms of being flexible and customizable. There's a limit to how many "editor workflows" one can use with Sublime (though Sublime is great) or Visual Studio or XCode or whatever. Not so with vim and emacs. They both also have decades of plugins and hardening. It's only natural that developers who prefer OSS and jump around amongst different languages and platforms would gravitate towards vim and emacs.

Those of us who love one of those two editors (vim, in my case) are often very curious to see how the other side lives, what workflows they use, etc. That curiosity is a great thing. Trying to improve your skills is a great thing. Stop complaining about it.

If you don't care or maybe used to care but are now soooooo over it, then just don't freaking open the comments, right? This topic is totally germane to HN and interesting to many of us.

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