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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)

#151

Post by jhchabran »

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 would say that what areally changes the game is to use evil (vi style bindings, 95% stays the same) with Emacs so you keep the muscle memory and you can keep making use of the common ex commands.

I have gone back and forth between vim and emacs, usually for a bunch of years each time before currently settling on emacs with Doom. With the nativecomp branch, it's actually pretty snappy and doom emacs is a great setup to get started without drowning in the amount of configuration.

I would say that I just love vim style input and modal editing, but doing that on top of emacs with evil mode and elisp is a better match for me than vimscript. The feedback loop you get with LISP and emacs is incredible when tweaking things to your liking.

Every function is accessible, there is just a global scope and you can call pretty much anything. It's sounds like an horrible idea, but it also means you can quickly hack stuff by reusing the internals of a package you like.

For example, it took me half an hour to initially POC this https://github.com/jhchabran/ivy-lsp-current-buffer-symbols by just skimming through the emacs-lsp codebase and randomly trying funcs in the repl to get an idea of what each function was doing.

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

#152

Post by jhchabran »

If anyone wants to give a try, it's worth noting a few things if you come from vim:

- if you are on osx, you'll may find the gui rendering quite laggy if you are using a Retina display. Using the terminal will make it snappy again. Using something like Alacritty will make it even snappier if you're sensitive to it.

- if you are on linux and use the gui, the pgtk branch is worth giving a try, it drops the old extremely outdated Xt code

- LSP can be quite resource hungry, it's really worth giving a try to the nativecomp branch of emacs 28. https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GccEmacs

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

#153

Post by bjoli »

omoikane wrote: post #64
salmo wrote: post #54

In 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…

> this text box, etc. I always keep a GVIM window open so that I can type text there and then paste those into other places that are not vi. It also helps that vi is a lot more stable than certain websites and is less likely to lose my text. It's nice to be able to just copy&paste without having to re-type the same text when browser crashes.

As always, the Emacs experience is better: https://github.com/zachcurry/emacs-anywhere

:)

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

#154

Post by auslegung »

soldeace wrote: post #22
syntheticnature wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vi's sense of composability. For example, 'd' is the delete command, but what does it delete? It deletes across a motion. What is a motion? Could be any movement mode supported by the editor, which ranges from simple cursor motions to motions involving words or blocks to forms of searching to raw line number jumps. So, once you learn a vi command, you can use it with all the motions you already know, and once you lea…

I can relate. Going from Emacs to evil-mode (not pure vim) has been a bliss. Text and code editing feels almost like playing a game.

For me, using VSCode felt neat. Learning and using nvim felt fun. Learning and using doom emacs feels exciting.

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

#155

Post by auslegung »

sumnole wrote: post #40
mjfl wrote: post #13

I started with emacs and never learned vim. What am I missing?

I'd like to ask the opposite question as someone who knows Vim but not Emacs. What am I missing if I'm only concerned with text editing?

Org mode. Not sure if that’s relevant for you because I don’t know what “text editing” includes for you. But it’s a killer feature

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

#156

Post by zarkov99 »

alpaca128 wrote: post #38
zarkov99 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An interesting path is to go from regular emacs to emacs with vim bindings, which is what I did, also in around 14 days. Its painful, but good for you brain. And you get the best of both worlds, or so I like to think.

I tried that too for a bit over two weeks. In the end I had a comfortable configuration, but with noticably worse performance and a lot of inconsistencies. Whenever I use Emacs I kind of like the concept but at the same time feel like the good parts are buried beneath countless random additions that should have been optional plugins. I dare to claim that >95% of Emacs users do not use its integrated Tetris implementa…

You might be right, though I do not have a good reference to compare Emacs + evil with. I think by default Emacs is a somewhat mediocre editor, the one thing that saves it is the unparalleled customizability, which should allow you to slowly prune the randomness and inconsistencies. But it is a commitment, not everybody wants a relationship with their editor. Btw, I regularly play Tetris in emacs ;-)

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

#157

Post by auslegung »

da39a3ee wrote: post #115

I love emacs as a lisp environment to work in and have used it for 20 years but the emacs LSP picture is starting to look seriously sketchy in comparison with what more language-specific IDEs such as VSCode and PyCharm etc offer. Especially now that static typing is becoming standard in languages like Python and Javascript. If you have a lot of spare time you can probably make eglot and lsp-mode work in your favorite…

My only experience with emacs is doom emacs, and only about 6 months, but I haven’t felt this pain other than getting the right formatter to format. I’m doing frontend react work so primarily tsx and sass, so maybe not a counterpoint but

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

#158

Post by Graziano_M »

cutler wrote: post #123
cwlb wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I picked up spacemacs earlier this year but have since switched to Doom emacs: https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs it's smaller, faster, and you configure it in a way that's closer to vanilla emacs. The size makes it more tractable to learn. The creator & primary maintainer is more active, funny, and helpful than the spacemacs maintainer who I believe is on hiatus. I wish someone had told Doom about it before I pi…

I've been using Spacemacs for Clojure development for years but stable has been stuck on the same version for ages so is it actually maintained?

You should switch to develop. They are working on release 300 and there are commits being merged daily.

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

#159

Post by soraminazuki »

bjoli wrote: post #153
omoikane wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this text box, etc. I always keep a GVIM window open so that I can type text there and then paste those into other places that are not vi. It also helps that vi is a lot more stable than certain websites and is less likely to lose my text. It's nice to be able to just copy&paste without having to re-type the same text when browser crashes.

As always, the Emacs experience is better: https://github.com/zachcurry/emacs-anywhere :)

It's literally inspired by vim-anywhere.

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

#160

Post by based8 »

jimbokun wrote: post #59
bitwize wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it's even more useless fluff than it was back in the day because people used Vim and Emacs in large numbers back then. These days the vast bulk of professional developers use Visual Studio Code. Compared to VSCode vs. IntelliJ, Vim vs. Emacs is a sideshow at best.

> Vim vs. Emacs is a sideshow at best. Until you need to ssh into a server and edit something.

This always comes up. How can we still not edit a remote file via ssh using whatever you want!?!
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