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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)

#41

Post by jes5199 »

syntheticnature wrote: post #20
mjfl wrote: post #13

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

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've used vim for more than 20 years, but lately I'm finding that now that `prettier` and `black` can just reformat code wholesale, I don't have to care as much about the precise tiny edits that vim is so good at. And when I'm not worried about those things, I start to notice that modern IDEs have much smarter syntax checking and whole-project search than I've ever seen in vim, even with plugins. So I think I'm moving on.

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

#43

Post by alex_smart »

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)

Vim user for 12 years, Emacs user for 5. I prefer and mainly use Emacs after I finally "got it". My previous attempts at learning Emacs weren't as successful because I was too biased about what a good editor should be like because of my familiarity with vim - mainly I was annoyed about silly things like having to press 4 keypresses for tasks that would take two keypresses in vim. So, if you decide to give Emacs a try, keep your preconceptions away and accept that it will take months before you "get" Emacs, the same way it probably took months before you "got" vim.

I still use vim when I am at a new system or on a remote server, but Emacs is love, Emacs is home. It is the most open, discoverable and hackable software system I have ever used. Every action, button, keybinding is easily introspectable - and it takes only a few clicks to get even to the source of the functionality that you are interested in. Almost every aspect of this system is modifiable by the user, even on the fly.

The only downside is that it is so much fun to play with your emacs config that you might spend too much time doing that instead of productive work. By contrast, vimscript is so disgusting that I don't think that I ever wrote a single line of vim config that wasn't copy-pasted from somewhere.

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

#44

Post by newlisper »

anand-bala wrote: post #10
hirundo wrote: post #3

> If, like me, you’re curious enough to give Emacs a try... So curiosity rather than conversion. Six year later is he still using Emacs? Went back to Vim? Moved on to something else? I have enough years invested in muscle memory of Vim itself and various plugins that what curiosity I have about Emacs is well controlled. I doubt I have runway left to get to the same productivity in another editor.

This is a great point. Personally, the only reason I would want to switch to Emacs is Org mode but the muscle memory for custom Vim and Tmux keymaps is hard to give up.

FWIW, I use emacs(with evil) inside tmux, so you can keep your flow if you are willing to invest in the transition.

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

#45

Post by newlisper »

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?

Nothing, if you are only concerned with text editing.

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

#46

Post by flowerlad »

mjfl wrote: post #13

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

I am conversant with both. You are not really missing anything. I use vi when emacs is not already installed and I need to quickly edit a file. That's the main difference, for me. vi is already there, but emacs has to be installed.

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

#47

Post by flowerlad »

andrewzah wrote: post #24

This article fails to explain -why- one would want to switch to emacs from vim. Org-mode and configuring emacs in a lisp-like are cool, but are not worth re-learning everything for me. I put that time in already by reading "Practical Vim" by Drew Neil and other vim literature online. I'm sure everyone is already aware, but vi is available basically everywhere. This has saved my ass at least twice where I couldn't acc…

One good reason is programmability. You can write lisp scripts to automate some routine editing.

For me the main reason I prefer emacs is the key bindings are better.

Another reason that emacs (the real thing) is available everywhere. You can install it on Linux, Mac and Windows. And you can run it in console mode (terminal) as well as GUI (even on Windows).

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

#48

Post by thewakalix »

flowerlad wrote: post #47
andrewzah wrote: post #24

This article fails to explain -why- one would want to switch to emacs from vim. Org-mode and configuring emacs in a lisp-like are cool, but are not worth re-learning everything for me. I put that time in already by reading "Practical Vim" by Drew Neil and other vim literature online. I'm sure everyone is already aware, but vi is available basically everywhere. This has saved my ass at least twice where I couldn't acc…

One good reason is programmability. You can write lisp scripts to automate some routine editing. For me the main reason I prefer emacs is the key bindings are better. Another reason that emacs (the real thing) is available everywhere. You can install it on Linux, Mac and Windows. And you can run it in console mode (terminal) as well as GUI (even on Windows).

That depends on what the meaning of "everywhere" is.

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

#49

Post by alex_smart »

andrewzah wrote: post #24

This article fails to explain -why- one would want to switch to emacs from vim. Org-mode and configuring emacs in a lisp-like are cool, but are not worth re-learning everything for me. I put that time in already by reading "Practical Vim" by Drew Neil and other vim literature online. I'm sure everyone is already aware, but vi is available basically everywhere. This has saved my ass at least twice where I couldn't acc…

How many lines of vimscript have you written? No, copy-pasting config lines from someone's dotfiles doesn't count. How many times have you opened the source code of some vim plugin you are using and tried to modify what it does?

If I were to hazard a guess: zero. That was also me during ten years of vim usage. Vim encourages the mindset of mastery = learning a bunch of tricks, remembering them and incorporating them into muscle memory.

Emacs on the other hand encourages the mindset that my editor is a programmable tool, I am a programmer, I can make it do whatever I want. You are always just one click away from the source code implementing any functionality of your editor, which you can, if you choose to do so, modify and evaluate on the fly.

> vi is available basically everywhere

Emacs-like shortcuts are also available wherever you have readline (e.g. many shells).

>This has saved my ass at least twice where I couldn't access vim or had internet access to install XYZ editor.

In those situations, I also still use vim. But 99% of the time, I am not on some remote machine, I am on my personal computer, so I can choose to use a tool that is not installed by default. The basic vim commands I have internalized over the years are sufficient for those odd jobs.

>So as a power vim user I see no reason to switch.

To each their own. Personally, I think that Emacs is a much more rewarding tool to master.

>most editors now have support for reasonable vim bindings

So does Emacs :)

In fact Emacs' vim plugin is probably has the most feature rich of all the vim emulations.

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

#50

Post by boogies »

andrewzah wrote: post #24

This article fails to explain -why- one would want to switch to emacs from vim. Org-mode and configuring emacs in a lisp-like are cool, but are not worth re-learning everything for me. I put that time in already by reading "Practical Vim" by Drew Neil and other vim literature online. I'm sure everyone is already aware, but vi is available basically everywhere. This has saved my ass at least twice where I couldn't acc…

> This article fails to explain -why- one would want to switch to emacs from vim.

In other words it does one thing, hopefully well. The philosophy behind the original vi, and IIRC originally vim too — didn’t it previously have an explicit non-goal of adding an embedded terminal emulator? If it did, those days seem over, so you IMO you might as well use an editor that does many things well (eg. having a proper designed language as the default for configuration, not the bodge that is vimscript with Lua as just a secondary option ), if you’re going to use an IDE and not an actually minimal text editor like vis or sam.

Fortunately you don’t need to ‘re-learn everything’ with evil-mode. I doubt other editors’ support for reasonable vim bindings is as complete as the common base of Spacemacs and Doom, they certainly aren’t as complete of operating systems, capable of being your WM (EXWM) or your init system or shell (http://www.informatimago.com/linux/emacs-on-user-mode-linux....), nor capable of running in a terminal over ssh.

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