> 8 years user here so still an emacs noobie, but I switched to nvim
I don't know man, whenever I see comments like this, I just don't get it - there's just no "switching" for me personally to anything, like ever, I just don't even see the possibility for it.
The question that always gets me is like: "were you just using it like ... I don't know to edit text? That's all you've done with it?..."
I have no idea how would I be able to do my things in anything else, whatever that is - Nvim, Sublime, Helix, etc.
- How would I control video playback from my editor while taking notes?
- How would I annotate PDFs?
- Or, create and manage Anki cards - my flashcards are just my notes, they don't require a different medium to exist.
- Or how would I test APIs - I don't need to use stuff like Postman - all my endpoint investigations are in my notes. Documented and perfectly reproducible.
- How would I manage my dotfiles? I use Org-babel for it and it makes my entire system immutable - is it better than Nix? I dunno, it just works and it's simple.
- What would I use for file management? I just wrote a wrapper that uses rsync to move large files around, how would I ever do anything like this in other than Emacs? How would I mark all the files that are over 1GB, older than three months and match a given regexp?
- In Emacs, I can move my cursor to a piece of plain text like "RFC 959", "SAC-28410", or "my-org/some-service#182" and immediately start reading shit - it intelligently recognizes that the first one is an RFC document, another is a Jira ticket and the third one is a Pull-request on GitHub.
- I can type a single query and simultaneously search for it on Wikipedia, Google, YouTube, GitHub, Hacker News or my own browser history, and I wouldn't even know how to do that in something that's not Emacs.
- In Emacs I can type a shell command and pipe results into a buffer, or pipe the content of a buffer to a shell command.
- In Emacs, my color theme changes depending on time of the day, because Emacs has built-in lunar and solar calendars.
- How would I read and manage my email in Helix?
- How would I track time? Clock in/out of tasks, generate time reports, do pomodoros?
- How would I search, browse and read Hacker News and Reddit?
- How would I create presentations?
- How would I test database queries?
- How would I manage Docker containers?
- How would I read man pages?
- How do I translate text?
- And how would I interact with LLMs?
...
Nope, there's no "switching" for me. It's just not possible. My entire life is woven into this text-based operating system. My thoughts, my work, my communications, my entertainment - they all exist as interconnected plain text that I can grep, link, transform, and version control. Every keystroke I've memorized, every workflow I've perfected, every piece of data that references another - it would take years to rebuild this in whatever there might be, and I'd still be left with a pale imitation. Emacs isn't just where I edit text; it's where I live.