What is this new-fangled Emacs?? WordStar ought to be enough for anybody!
Emacs is older than Wordstar.
From Vim to Emacs in fourteen days (2015)
101–110 of 182 posts
Re: From Vim to Emacs in fourteen days (2015)
#102In college I used Emacs, because I had a romance with lisps and just really enjoyed extending stuff. Also used Sawfish as my window manager, etc. The modal thing in vi(m) was hard for me to wrap my head around and the bizarre config of vim seemed so inelegant. But when I got a gig as a sysadmin running a few thousand servers w/ a slew of Unixes (Solaris, BSD, HP-UX, Linux) I finally bit the bullet and learned vi, bec…
Funny you say that, because I always find myself reverting to emacs and, even after playing with config distros like Spacemacs and Doom Emacs, I've settled on on a severely minimal config with mostly default keybinds, and magit on the side because it is the best interface to git I've ever had the pleasure to use. I also enjoy running linters and test commands in a compilation buffer and hitting 'g' to re-run/refresh…
I learnt something cool about Emacs undo on a recent HN thread.
If some text is selected before invoking undo, then undo happens only within the selected region.
Re: From Vim to Emacs in fourteen days (2015)
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me the main reason I prefer emacs is the key bindings are better. Genuine question, why do you think emacs key bindings are better?
Take for example, incremental search. Emacs has it by default. Vi being older didn't have it, but vim has it. It has to be turned on. Then it doesn't work as well as emacs. In emacs you can type to search then ctrl+s to move to next match then continue to type to edit the search string, and so on. This is just one example. Replace has advantages in emacs when it comes to case matching. And it goes on and on.
> It has to be turned on.
"set incsearch" is all it takes to get incremental search. Are you trying to argue that Emacs defaults are so good that you never need to change it? I find it hard to believe you never have any "setq"s in your Emacs config.
> In emacs you can type to search then ctrl+s to move to next match then continue to type to edit the search string
In vim you can type to search then n to move to next match then / to continue to edit the search string. But seriously, a fuzzy searcher or :grep would be more useful for that sort of thing.
> Replace has advantages in emacs when it comes to case matching.
Case matching is a thing with Vim's regex too.
> And it goes on and on.
But all of the things mentioned so far are about basic editing capabilities that any decent editor would support one way another.
Re: From Vim to Emacs in fourteen days (2015)
#104I’m curious to hear from folks who have switched between the two, and have lasted for more than a year on both. If you’ve learned more than the basics and both became muscle memory, which did you end up sticking to? (Vim user for 23 years, Emacs user of none... but interested because of Lisp)
I have been using emacs like forever. Finally decided to learn vim 4 years back, as had to use Intellij Idea, and the default keybindings are crap for editing. Now, I use Doom Emacs with evil keybindings.
I am glad I took time to learn vim. The editing concepts around motion keys, text blocks etc. are just so much more powerful than emacs way.
I recommend all emacs users to learn vim atleast give evil mode a try.
Re: From Vim to Emacs in fourteen days (2015)
#105In college I used Emacs, because I had a romance with lisps and just really enjoyed extending stuff. Also used Sawfish as my window manager, etc. The modal thing in vi(m) was hard for me to wrap my head around and the bizarre config of vim seemed so inelegant. But when I got a gig as a sysadmin running a few thousand servers w/ a slew of Unixes (Solaris, BSD, HP-UX, Linux) I finally bit the bullet and learned vi, bec…
If you're a firefox user, check this out: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tridactyl-vim...
Re: From Vim to Emacs in fourteen days (2015)
#106Just for fun, here are some of the larger past threads. Others? After over a decade of Vim, I’m hooked on Emacs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16551796 - March 2018 (161 comments) A pragmatic decision on GNU Emacs versus Vim for programming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13590944 - Feb 2017 (59 comments) Why I switched from Vim to Emacs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13130775 - Dec 2016 (101 c…
Emacs vs Vim is like comfort food for software-related online discussions.
I guess, given how evil-mode just gets better and better every day I'm not really seeing many people moving in the other direction, at least based on the blog posts.
No shade on Vim, people like it and are productive in it. I see it like using Sublime Text, lots of people can get away with it, but I need more doodads in my editor.
And hey, nobody is like "Notepad++ vs. Visual Studio", which I think kinda matches the mismatch (or maybe "Notepad++ vs Atom" or something)
Re: From Vim to Emacs in fourteen days (2015)
#107Re: From Vim to Emacs in fourteen days (2015)
#108In college I used Emacs, because I had a romance with lisps and just really enjoyed extending stuff. Also used Sawfish as my window manager, etc. The modal thing in vi(m) was hard for me to wrap my head around and the bizarre config of vim seemed so inelegant. But when I got a gig as a sysadmin running a few thousand servers w/ a slew of Unixes (Solaris, BSD, HP-UX, Linux) I finally bit the bullet and learned vi, bec…
If you're a firefox user, check this out: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tridactyl-vim...
Perhaps it's just my wimpy laptop, but last time I tried tridactyl it was pretty slow. Vimium (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/) has been a bit better for me, although I think it's quite a bit less configurable than tridactyl.
Re: From Vim to Emacs in fourteen days (2015)
#109I’m curious to hear from folks who have switched between the two, and have lasted for more than a year on both. If you’ve learned more than the basics and both became muscle memory, which did you end up sticking to? (Vim user for 23 years, Emacs user of none... but interested because of Lisp)
In the 90s I used both editors interchangeably depending on the task (I had started with plain vi before vim). I was only grasping the surface of Emacs back then: I typically used it for editing plain text, emails, or scientific papers, but not as an OS or lisp system. I wrote code in either vim or Emacs without a clear preference, and sometimes I got annoyed at the extra milliseconds latency of starting emacsclient compared to starting vi. Once the majority of my terminals and shells were within emacs, I started favoring it. Once I realized that I strongly prefer to have several dozens, even hundreds of dumb terminal buffers with infinite history instead of proper terminals that can use curses but lack the complete past history, I switched to 95% Emacs, and I started keeping emacs sessions open for months at a time. Then I read the manual again, learned some elisp, added a couple convenience functions, and got totally hooked. Nowadays I may use vim once every couple of months, but the vast majority of my working time is within Emacs. Recently, I've started exploring ways to include part of web browsing in emacs, and I started wondering if most of my daily compute needs could be satisfied within Emacs. I guess that until I have a reasonable emacs interface on my phone, I will still spend some computer time outside of Emacs, but be warned that once you enter the Emacs cult, there is no easy way to exit.
Re: From Vim to Emacs in fourteen days (2015)
#110Does it feel weird that you have to enable Evil mode to use emacs? I have been using Vim for most my life and switched to emacs last years. I am using vanilla version with lots of plugins of course.
Not really. Evil's vim emulation are quite impressive, and it's doing its best to make the bindings available everywhere in Emacs. However, the behavior of each keys in different buffers are somewhat less consistent than with Vim, which is inevitable because Emacs buffers are used more like an UI for elisp applications. I think the benefits far outweigh the minor inconsistencies though.