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From Vim to Emacs in fourteen days (2015)

blog.aaronbieber.com

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Re: From Vim to Emacs in fourteen days (2015)

#141

Post by nemoniac »

drums8787 wrote: post #74

I went in the other direction about 5 years ago after 20 years of always installing Emacs on every computer I ever used. Vim has had a much bigger impact on my productivity. Partly because of excellent plugins (VSCode, Visual Studio), partly because, for some reason I bothered to learn Vim shortcuts to degree I never did with Emacs. And I just love that vi and vim is quick and available on my various cloud servers. O…

> after 20 years of always installing Emacs on every computer I ever used.

You don't need to install emacs on every computer you use. The emacs on your laptop has tramp so you can edit any file on any computer you have ssh access into.

Re: From Vim to Emacs in fourteen days (2015)

#142

Post by gspr »

Tangentially related: I've used emacs for coding for a decade, and for email for a few years. I love it. But I'm missing out on its arguably strongest feature: elisp! My config file is a tragedy of stuff I hamfistedly cobbled together. I'd like to learn this skill properly, and thus conquer the world (I assume this makes me able to).

Can anyone recommend a resource? I speak some C-like languages, and Python and Haskell, but no LISP at all. I'm an emacs user, but have only superficial knowledge of how emacs actually works.

Re: From Vim to Emacs in fourteen days (2015)

#143

Post by gypsyharlot »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #127
ph2082 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From >> Debian's Vim maintainer switches to Emacs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=341492 - Oct 2008 (32 comments) He warned me I should switch from vi to emacs because prolonged vi usage causes hair loss. :)

Maybe, but prolonged emacs use causes carpal tunnel syndrome!

Only if you don't use a keyboard the way it was intended. For example, Ctrl-c should involve both hands. If you press Ctrl-c with only your left hand (there's a reason your keyboard has a right Ctrl), you will gradually hurt your wrists. Emacs can accelerate this, since a lot of things begin with Ctrl-x, assuming that you never use the right side Ctrl.

Re: From Vim to Emacs in fourteen days (2015)

#144

Post by mvanaltvorst »

gypsyharlot wrote: post #143
ARandomerDude wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but prolonged emacs use causes carpal tunnel syndrome!

Only if you don't use a keyboard the way it was intended. For example, Ctrl-c should involve both hands. If you press Ctrl-c with only your left hand (there's a reason your keyboard has a right Ctrl), you will gradually hurt your wrists. Emacs can accelerate this, since a lot of things begin with Ctrl-x, assuming that you never use the right side Ctrl.

I have never had carpal tunnel-like symptoms yet, though I just realised I've only used left ctrl for the past 10 years. I'll definitely be more mindful of that. Do you have any more resources on avoiding common typing pitfalls, or specific wrist movements one should avoid while typing? Should capitalising your sentences be a two-hand action as well, considering I normally only use left shift?

Re: From Vim to Emacs in fourteen days (2015)

#145

Post by susam »

Jach wrote: post #35
alfiedotwtf wrote: post #8

I’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'll just say if you want to do Common Lisp, vim works fine, so don't let that hold you back from pursuing your interest. The slimv plugin is good. (Some people also like vlime better. To be honest I've had some buggy experiences with both, I suggest try both and pick what you like. vlime has one debugging improvement in that you don't need to manually call (swank-backend:restart-frame N).) I'd like to give emacs one…

> I'll just say if you want to do Common Lisp, vim works fine, so don't let that hold you back from pursuing your interest.

I agree. For those who are interested in using Vim as their development environment for Common Lisp, I have written a detailed comparison between Slimv and Vlime here: https://susam.in/blog/lisp-in-vim-with-slimv-or-vlime/

And for those who are willing to start Common Lisp development using Emacs, there is Portacle which is a really quick way to set up a working environment with a few clicks. There is also https://github.com/susam/emacs4cl that I wrote to offer as a quick-starter DIY alternative for those who want to use vanilla Emacs and want to configure it themselves without wasting too much time.

Re: From Vim to Emacs in fourteen days (2015)

#146

Post by hannofcart »

jhchabran wrote: post #138
hannofcart wrote: post #137

Recently, I too tried making the switch from vim to Emacs via the Spacemacs route. The effort didn't last long. I found that Spacemacs, without installing any extra "layers" than what comes out of the box, consumes too much RAM. Over 1GB of it. Don't know if this was expected or if it was something specific to just my machine.

May I advise to give a try to Doom instead? It has less ambitious objectives [1] and feels much snappier while providing a similar experience (vim-like, out of the box) Also, if you enjoy the experience provided by emacs + evil, giving a try to the native compilation branch of emacs 28 gives noticeable improvement in terms of speed. [1] Spacemacs "it's a sophisticated and polished set-up, focused on ergonomics, mnemo…

Thanks for taking the time to give a detailed recommendation. Setting up Doom right now!

Re: From Vim to Emacs in fourteen days (2015)

#147

Post by lelanthran »

BeetleB wrote: post #101
simonblack wrote: post #83

What is this new-fangled Emacs?? WordStar ought to be enough for anybody!

Emacs is older than Wordstar.

> Emacs is older than Wordstar.

True, but only because Emacs is older than God :-)

(They say they used parenthesis, but it was just snippets of Perl everywhere: https://xkcd.com/224/)

Re: From Vim to Emacs in fourteen days (2015)

#148

Post by signa11 »

lelanthran wrote: post #147
BeetleB wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs is older than Wordstar.

> Emacs is older than Wordstar. True, but only because Emacs is older than God :-) (They say they used parenthesis, but it was just snippets of Perl everywhere: https://xkcd.com/224/ )

email sig:

In the beginning was the lambda, and the lambda was with Emacs, and Emacs was the lambda.

Re: From Vim to Emacs in fourteen days (2015)

#149

Post by tincholio »

kirubakaran wrote: post #88
SkyMarshal wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fwiw Spacemacs is another good combination of the two, similar to evil mode. https://www.spacemacs.org/

Doom too https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs

Spacemacs has been gradually breaking over the years, and is a lot more complex than Doom. I migrated about a year ago, and save for some fairly minimal muscle-memory adaptation and modifications to some packages' config, it's been very smooth sailing.

Re: From Vim to Emacs in fourteen days (2015)

#150

Post by belgesel »

sigjuice wrote: post #102
ljm wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

this is nice. Just like bash, emacs has so many features hidden under it's hood.
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