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From Vim to Emacs

juanjoalvarez.net

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Re: From Vim to Emacs

#111

Post by Quasimoto3000 »

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…

But you can get Vim's modal editing with Emacs'evil-mode.

Re: From Vim to Emacs

#113

Post by mattvvhat »

Tenhundfeld wrote: post #100
mattvvhat wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

-_- 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…

You know, I agree that I shouldn't care. That was a momentary sentiment.

Either way, I use vim, and, as a result, I have to listen to pro-and-con debates unwillingly... all the time. At the time, this was an example.

In actuality there is no right answer to what browser is best. Personally, I think vim is fast and easier-on-the-hands than emacs. In particular, I never have to lift my hands from the main row, where in emacs I too-frequently have to press combinations of keys and shift my positioning.

This all comes from someone who originally used emacs, then converted to vim.

Re: From Vim to Emacs

#114

Post by GeneralMayhem »

notfoss wrote: post #92
endlessvoid94 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Map caps lock to control and it gets a lot better.

Re: From Vim to Emacs

#115

Post by Attic »

GeneralMayhem wrote: post #114
notfoss wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Map caps lock to control and it gets a lot better.

Or use god mode!

Re: From Vim to Emacs

#116

Post by colbyh »

bnolsen wrote: post #81

vim is already too slow (i typically code edit with elvis which is good but not for huge text data files). evil's lagginness is utterly maddenning. and emacs isn't typically installed everywhere. i'm a multi terminal user who typically works remotely via ssh, remote usually being over a gigabit connection. I can probably burst 120+ wpm and yeah watching other people code is typically very painful. And I don't use plu…

If we're being pedantic, Vim isn't installed everywhere either. Vi is, of course, but if you're evangelizing the benefits of the posix shell over vim-specific plugins I can only assume you didn't mean to :%s/vim/vi/ before hitting reply ;-).

Re: From Vim to Emacs

#117

Post by Tenhundfeld »

mattvvhat wrote: post #113
Tenhundfeld wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You know, I agree that I shouldn't care. That was a momentary sentiment. Either way, I use vim, and, as a result, I have to listen to pro-and-con debates unwillingly... all the time. At the time, this was an example. In actuality there is no right answer to what browser is best. Personally, I think vim is fast and easier-on-the-hands than emacs. In particular, I never have to lift my hands from the main row, where in…

I hear ya. I actually hate listening to pointless debates about vim vs emacs too – especially if it's among coworkers or some situation I can't just ignore.

Re: From Vim to Emacs

#118

Post by godDLL »

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…

There is VimR, Vico and a plethora of other editors that support the VIM paradigm to an extent. You should be browsing around.

Re: From Vim to Emacs

#119

Post by klibertp »

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…

I was a Vim user for 5 years, then an Emacs user for about 3, and then I purchased PyCharm two weeks ago.

I don't regret buying it, but after some time I realised that it's impossible to replace Emacs completely with PyCharm.

PyCharm's support for refactoring and code transformations is very good. It's fast and easy and it makes some kinds of source code edits much more efficient than what you can do even in Vim and Emacs. Its debugger, including remote debugger is very good, too. Visualising project and file structure in a sidebar is much, much better than what Speedbar and ECB (at least for Python - I heard they work very well for other languages) can do. Codebase navigation is nice (go to symbol, etc.), although Emacs with all its tools like jedi, ag, e/ctags, occur, imenu and so on is not that much worse here.

PyCharm is very good for working with code. However, it lacks so many text editing features, that it's just too painful for me to use it exclusively. Even with many plugins installed and multiple cursors feature provided (recently - how could it take them so long to implement it?) text editing experience in PyCharm is much worse than it is in Emacs (or Vim, for that matter). And, unfortunately, working with source code is in large part the same as working with plain text.

An then there's a problem with extending PyCharm. The need to write Java code to extend an editor seems like a really bad joke. There are plugins, which let you script PyCharm with Groovy or Clojure, which I installed, only to discover that the Clojure syntax highlighting plugin for PyCharm doesn't work right now. Discovering the relevant APIs to call from a script was a major pain, too, compared to Emacs built-in combo of info manuals and help system with apropos and many reflective commands like describe-*. This is a problem, because using Emacs made my tolerance for putting up with broken/inconvenient behaviours disappear - many things I know I should be able to achieve in two keypresses in PyCharm take 3 or 4. That's not a big difference and I realize it! Yet after working with Emacs and writing ~5k loc of Elisp to scratch almost all my daily itches I just can't force myself to just ignore it and get used to this itching again, even if it's minor.

My solution was to create a quick keyboard shortcut in PyCharm which calls emacsclient with current file, placing the cursor in a current line. Surprisingly, it works very well. Launching a new Emacs frame takes almost no time at all, and when I close the frame after editing, PyCharm immediately displays updated content.

Re: From Vim to Emacs

#120

Post by klibertp »

unhammer wrote: post #77

"With Vim I had defined a keybinding that selected the last pasted text. It was useful when you wanted to reformat or indent text that you've pasted from somewhere. At the moment I've been unable to reproduce this in Emacs." - in non-evil-mode at least, C-x C-x will reselect what you last pasted if you haven't moved. What really happens is that when you paste, the "mark" is set there (equivalent to doing C-SPC), and…

No need for text properties, just make "yank-last-start" and "yank-last-end" markers instead of simple ints (https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Ma...) - they will be moved automatically with every edit.
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