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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)

#61

Post by arc-in-space »

davidw wrote: post #31
dang wrote: post #2

Just for fun, here are some of the larger past threads. Others? After over a decade of Vim, I’m hooked on Emacs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16551796 - March 2018 (161 comments) A pragmatic decision on GNU Emacs versus Vim for programming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13590944 - Feb 2017 (59 comments) Why I switched from Vim to Emacs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13130775 - Dec 2016 (101 c…

Emacs vs Vim is like comfort food for software-related online discussions.

I need to make a conscious effort to stay the hell away whenever this comes up here on hn. It's not the only topic that does this, but it's by far the least productive one, lang wars can at least be educational.

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

#63

Post by andrewzah »

alex_smart wrote: post #49
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…

"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?"

Well, I haven't had a real reason to do so. I used to use more plugins but I slowly am paring it down to a much more minimal configuration. I'm not a huge fan of vimscript, but I don't think it's worth changing over to emacs for. Plain vi actually isn't that bad, depending on the version.

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

Sure, and I appreciate the irony of learning some emacs shortcuts for readline while using vim. But that's different from editing. The only time I've seen vi not available is in scratch/alpine linux containers where busybox essentials weren't installed either.

I suppose my use case is different because I work a lot with containers, and minimal install systems in general.

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

#64

Post by omoikane »

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.

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

#65

Post by cwlb »

maximilianroos wrote: post #39

For those who use Vim bindings, and would like to try out emacs, I'd suggest trying Spacemacs: https://www.spacemacs.org/ It has "evil mode" by default — the vim bindings. I picked this up at Jane Street, where much of the internal tooling is in emacs. I still use it wherever I can't get a good vscode setup, and it has some advantages over vscode.

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 picked up spacemacs so maybe this post will benefit past-future-me.

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

#66

Post by colordrops »

alex_smart wrote: post #49
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…

It's certainly easier than editing an XMonad config without knowing Haskell.

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

#67

Post by guest2143 »

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?

The ability to travel thru time with :earlier & :later

(edit like a timelord!)

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

#68

Post by nix-zarathustra »

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…

He actually has a talk about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWD1Fpdd4Pc

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

#69

Post by ljm »

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…

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 it after making changes in the files I'm working on. And the way emacs handles undo/redo feels intuitive to me in a way I can't really explain.

Essentially, I get modality when I want an interface. And the rest of the time, I type.

I still make sure that I know good-enough vim and nano so I can do what I want outside of my own environment.

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

#70

Post by ithrow »

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).

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

Genuine question, why do you think emacs key bindings are better?

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