IDEmacs: A Visual Studio Code clone for Emacs

I am a die-hard vimmer. I just one day woke up and realized that Emacs vims better than Vim. Seriously though - it's not about concrete implementations, it's all about the [abstract] ideas.

I use vim navigation everywhere - in my editor, my browser, my terminal (I use nvim too), my WM, remote sessions. I control my music, video-playback, app switcher - all, using mostly just home row keys. I never need to touch arrow keys and rarely have to reach for the mouse.

Idea of vim navigation is an absolutely brilliant, beautiful, practical model, it speaks to me and I have zero reasons for not using it. What keeps me with Emacs is another immeasurably brilliant idea - the idea of practical notation for lambda calculus, which is known as Lisp. Lisp probably can be crowned as one of the most important ideas in computer science. It's just hard to think of anything more influential than Lisp.

There's a notable shared trait between these two - they both entail tacit knowledge. You're probably well aware of what I'm hinting at. You see, trying to teach someone who never rode a bike is challenging for a similar reason. You may show them countless videos, explain how gyroscopic effect and caster effect keep the bicycle stable, you can draw diagrams and try to inspire them with names of all famous people who loved riding - none of it can explain the simple joy of an ordinary bike ride on a straight line. Until they've tried for themselves, nothing will ever make them feel what they can never unlearn later.

> I use both IntelliJ and (n)vim almost side-by-side

I perfectly pictured my own younger self - I absolutely had maintained the same setup not too many years ago, before diving into Emacs. And then it became three things side-by-side. Eventually, I had to stop this madness and forced myself to use only one. I made a promise that instead of reaching to the familiar and cozy confines and warmth of WebStorm, whenever I had to get something done, I would try to google and find ways to achieve the same things in Emacs. I really wanted to figure it out and make the decision once and for all. My plan was to time-box that experiment for a week, fully expecting that in the end it will replace Vim, but certainly not WS. After a week I decided I liked it and I wanted to keep going. Two months later I realized - I had not had to run WebStorm even once. Five month later I decided not to extend my license for next year, but it was never about the money.

Keep finding new bicycles to ride. Even when you don't feel like it, and especially when it feels kinda scary.

I use Emacs for managing files (with Dired) running shell commands, bookkeeping, keeping notes and chatting with LLM services.

I too can't take a seriously an editor which doesn't have Vim keybindigns at least in a very basic form.

Keysets or chorded keyboards have been around since The Mother of all Demos, but never really seemed to have caught on. It makes sense to me to put them at your feet to chord some common actions or modifiers.

15 years ago I was in the same boat as you.I just had a set it and forget it config. But about 6 years ago I had to start adding addition languages support to my config, and started having to switch machines at work every year or so.

Emacs package manager has always been abysmal at reusing an existing config on a different machine, and always required significant updates to the config for the latest versions of the packages (which frequently have/had breaking changes every coupe years). So it became a config update every year or so, that would take a couple days at minimum.

Then the language support had to be addressed. With the couple days of updating every year or so, I start eying what other solutions are providing, especially since I was delving into new areas and toolsets. A few years ago simple dumb syntax and identifier fuzzy completion stopped being sufficient and table stakes became intelligent context-aware autocomomplete. Emacs setup for that was incredibly bad and has been extremely poor for years up until very recently. Only in the last year-ish has actual working LSP support finally been added and isn't bolted into a system that can barely cope. That means there was literally a gap of a few years where Emacs at best failed to meet the minimim to even be considered as a primary editor. Even still, the setup is very manual to get even the most basic integration.

A similar rush of features is now pretty normal in editors, and Emacs is simply not keeping up. It's now a question of trade offs: how much do I want those crazy editing features of Emacs, and how many one-click support and integration features that are standard across almost all competitors am I willing to go without or spend hours every couple weeks setting up?