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From Vim to Emacs in fourteen days (2015)
91–100 of 182 posts
Re: From Vim to Emacs in fourteen days (2015)
#92This 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…
Vim syntax isn't a "bunch of tricks" though. It's a syntax, with enough consistency that you're able to figure out new commands without looking them up. For example, "d$" cuts from your cursor to the end of the line, and since "y" stands for yank/copy, you can then figure out that "y$" copies from your cursor to the end of the line.
And also, the syntax is shared with other Unix tools like man, less, sed, etc.
I'm not saying Vim is objectively better than Emacs or anything, but the basic commands gg, G, d$, dd, y$, yy, ^, $, and so on really are handy as a tool.
(Also worth noting that the syntax has overlap with Regex, so "^" and "$" are very natural choices for commands that jump to the beginning and end of the current line.)
Re: From Vim to Emacs in fourteen days (2015)
#93Does it feel weird that you have to enable Evil mode to use emacs? I have been using Vim for most my life and switched to emacs last years. I am using vanilla version with lots of plugins of course.
Re: From Vim to Emacs in fourteen days (2015)
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just use emacs+evil for org only. Org is feature rich (bloated?) but these dynamic code blocks in documents are just too good. I prefer vim for everything else and the general "minimalist" approach in particular. Emacs seems to appeal to people who like to do everything within one tool.
I know org.mode is a deep rabbit hole - but do you have an example of "dynamic code blocks in documents"? I've recently switched my "notes.txt" buffer in (neo)vim to markdown ("notes.md) - along with a slightly more magical syntax plug-in - and I'm pleasantly surprised by the quality of life improvements from having multiple code/script snippets highlighted in-line (eg: ```SQL (... Snippet...) ``` in a paragraph foll…
I made a video[0] showing off the power of org-babel, which is the part of org that lets you embed dynamic code blocks in your document. In the video I write a little essay[1] on how git stores data that has a lot of dynamic content that is managed by org. It's a bit like reproducible research or literate programming, but for me it's all about writing technical documents that are easy to keep consistent when things change.
Re: From Vim to Emacs in fourteen days (2015)
#95Re: From Vim to Emacs in fourteen days (2015)
#96Re: From Vim to Emacs in fourteen days (2015)
#97> 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.
magit is the best git porcelain (interface) that I’ve ever seen. I’m a longtime emacs user, but even if I wasn’t, I’d provably use magit as my git interface
Re: From Vim to Emacs in fourteen days (2015)
#98Earlier 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.
It's funny you mention that.
https://www.murilopereira.com/how-to-open-a-file-in-emacs/
The summary is that the author tried to open a remote file and Emacs froze for several seconds. He dived deep into finding out why that was and how to fix it, pointing out how great Emacs's introspection is that one can find solutions to problems like these.
And then two thirds of the way into his essay, he has this:
> More recently, I’ve been very put off by the performance and stability (or lack thereof) of building large scale software via Tramp. This has been sufficient to have me looking out again. On a whim, I installed VSCode for the first time and tried its “remote development” capabilities and holy smokes are they good. Getting up and running was trivial and the performance was great. Saving files was snappy and LSP worked out of the box. What a different experience from my carefully-put-together, half-working, slow Emacs setup.
And then later:
> Improve Tramp performance to match the experience of using terminal Emacs via SSH, or VSCode’s Remote Development.
Re: From Vim to Emacs in fourteen days (2015)
#99I went in the other direction about 5 years ago after 20 years of always installing Emacs on every computer I ever used. Vim has had a much bigger impact on my productivity. Partly because of excellent plugins (VSCode, Visual Studio), partly because, for some reason I bothered to learn Vim shortcuts to degree I never did with Emacs. And I just love that vi and vim is quick and available on my various cloud servers. O…
I've used vim for years, but a few months back started using org mode with Spacemacs evil mode.
I like org mode a lot. It has a lot of functionality that makes it useful for all sorts of things beyond plain text editing. Using evil meant I didn't need retrain for common editing operations, although certain org-mode specific functionality means learning new Emacs-style key sequences.
Other than that, I still haven't learned anything about using plain emacs, so I only use emacs for editing org files. They're a different enough entity from ordinary text files that switching editors to use org mode doesn't bother me.
Re: From Vim to Emacs in fourteen days (2015)
#100> 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.
> So curiosity rather than conversion. Six year later is he still using Emacs? Went back to Vim? Moved on to something else?
He was as of Jan 2020.