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Emacs and Vim

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Re: Emacs and Vim

#91

Post by craigching »

aaronem wrote: post #74
athenot wrote: post #70

Whether it's vim or emacs, I've always been amazed how these tools can become an extension of the brain like an instrument whose purpose is to materialize a thought process. Framed that way, the editor wars look like a pianist debating with a violinist of the superiority of their respective instruments to convey human emotion. Watching a seasoned vim or emacs user create, mold, shape, reformat text like it was a piec…

> I think there are some mac-centric UX patterns that I have a hard time giving up. I can certainly understand that; I'm a relative newcomer to the platform, and while Emacs (of course) continues to behave regarding meta keys in the fashion I've spent a lifetime learning, getting used to Option-arrows for "move to next/previous word", and Command instead of Control for shortcuts, is really bothering me. (Of course, t…

> Command instead of Control for shortcuts

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but it sounds like you're using one of the Mac OSX ports of emacs that tries to make emacs behave more like a Mac app. My advice is don't do that. Use emacsformacos.com [1]. It's plain ol' GNU emacs built for the Mac platform. I was so glad to find this and quickly gave up Aquamacs. I want my emacs to behave the same whether I'm on Mac or Linux (or Windows for that matter, but I'm doing less and less on Windows these days).

Let me know if I've misunderstood you!

[1] -- http://emacsformacosx.com/

Re: Emacs and Vim

#92

Post by omaranto »

gergles wrote: post #37

I do wonder what it would be like to use an editor where the main cursor navigation was forward/backward incremental search. One case of this is the Canon CAT[1] word processor, which used "LEAP" keys for cursor movement (and nothing else). I'm often curious how productive it would be to use while coding. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat Bonus link: http://clickamericana.com/media/advertisements/the-canon-c…

When I use Vim or Emacs, forward/backward incremental search is the main cursor navigation. :)

So, to answer your question about what it's like: it's great!

Re: Emacs and Vim

#93

Post by unhammer »

aaronem wrote: post #74
athenot wrote: post #70

Whether it's vim or emacs, I've always been amazed how these tools can become an extension of the brain like an instrument whose purpose is to materialize a thought process. Framed that way, the editor wars look like a pianist debating with a violinist of the superiority of their respective instruments to convey human emotion. Watching a seasoned vim or emacs user create, mold, shape, reformat text like it was a piec…

> I think there are some mac-centric UX patterns that I have a hard time giving up. I can certainly understand that; I'm a relative newcomer to the platform, and while Emacs (of course) continues to behave regarding meta keys in the fashion I've spent a lifetime learning, getting used to Option-arrows for "move to next/previous word", and Command instead of Control for shortcuts, is really bothering me. (Of course, t…

When I had a Mac, I would use Command as Meta (and caps as ctrl, which is a good idea no matter what OS/editor you're using).

(Unfortunately option is still needed for certain symbol, like /|\, in many keymaps, but that's the mac's fault , not emacs.)

Re: Emacs and Vim

#94

Post by craigching »

phaer wrote: post #20
cies wrote: post #17

Emacs+Evil is the next Vim. And yes, CtrlP is probably the thing you'll miss most. But all the other things I got from switching from Vim to Emacs+Evil easily outweigh the missing CtrlP. Vim was great, until I wanted to customize it heavily. It is simply not made to facilitate things like: child processes, SSH, understanding my code, a visual interface for Git.

I haven't used CtrlP too much, but what are you missing in ido-mode or helm?

I only discovered ido about two years ago and, man, I can't imagine emacs without it now ... and I've been an emacs user for over 20 years! Only dabbled with helm a bit, there was one helm-enabled package that I really wanted to try.

Re: Emacs and Vim

#95

Post by Sanddancer »

oafitupa wrote: post #51
jeremiep wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They take a while to master, but once you get there no other editor on the planet can compete. Not by a long shot. And then you keep on learning. They also can run in a remote console which for me is reason alone not to use another editor.

"They also can run in a remote console which for me is reason alone not to use another editor." As a developer, that makes no sense to me. Do you really need a powerful remote editor? What do you need a remote editor for, other than checking that a config file was set up correctly, or reading a log file?

When your pager sounds at three in the morning with a problem that needs fixed Right Now, you start to realize what all the benefits of having your complete bag of tools on the server you're working on are. At the very least, you now have an interactive grep/sed/regex tool that you can use to strip out all the irrelevant info from the log file you're poring over. You can now jump between files with ease because of multiple buffers. You have interactive diffing. Your output of logfiles is now color coded. In short, you have all those tools on the box, with it managing all of the context, etc, for you, so you can more easily fix the problem, and get your butt back to bed.

Re: Emacs and Vim

#96

Post by MetaCosm »

bmoresbest55 wrote: post #39

I still do not undertand the devotion that people have with these text editors. I prefer Vim however I could see myself using it soley or even half the time. I feel like I know the basic commands and it is fast but with the ease of a sublime text or something similar why do people still use these pieces of software so frequently? (Not a rhetorical question)

Craftsmen and tools. It is an age old story, you grow to trust and understand a tool. Programmers and text editors are an extreme example, because programmers often spend 30+ hours a week using a single too, their editor.

Vim and Emacs have survived because they are "fit for a purpose"... they are really good at editing text! Emacs has a niche in expandability. You can always twist Emacs to do your bidding... and it has a culture of tinkers. Vim has much more of a culture of users, people who want to edit text rather that toy with their editor.

These editors have roots in the 70s and are still kicking -- that isn't some random accident, that is because the fundamental act of editing text hasn't change too much.

Re: Emacs and Vim

#98

Post by mercurial »

Cakez0r wrote: post #52
bmoresbest55 wrote: post #39

I still do not undertand the devotion that people have with these text editors. I prefer Vim however I could see myself using it soley or even half the time. I feel like I know the basic commands and it is fast but with the ease of a sublime text or something similar why do people still use these pieces of software so frequently? (Not a rhetorical question)

I couldn't imagine using standalone vim as an IDE either... However, if you want the best of both worlds then Visual Studio has a vim emulation plugin (VsVim) and Sublime has vim emulation mode too!

It depends, but if you do Haskell, with syntastic and ghcmod-vim, you get most of what I care about in an IDE, namely getting warning of errors before trying to run my program.

The Vim plugin for Visual Studio is very good, in my memory. Note that Kate has also a pretty good Vim mode. There is also a decent free Vim plugin for Eclipse [1].

1: http://vrapper.sourceforge.net/home/

Re: Emacs and Vim

#99

Post by MetaCosm »

phaer wrote: post #20
cies wrote: post #17

Emacs+Evil is the next Vim. And yes, CtrlP is probably the thing you'll miss most. But all the other things I got from switching from Vim to Emacs+Evil easily outweigh the missing CtrlP. Vim was great, until I wanted to customize it heavily. It is simply not made to facilitate things like: child processes, SSH, understanding my code, a visual interface for Git.

I haven't used CtrlP too much, but what are you missing in ido-mode or helm?

Fast proper fuzzy-find completion on files, buffers and tags that works across multiple platforms and even on files not in source control. In Vim I have it bound to f, b, t -- on my multiple trips over to Emacs land -- I have tried lots of ways to get the equivalent working and always come up short.

Re: Emacs and Vim

#100

Post by akerl_ »

cies wrote: post #17

Emacs+Evil is the next Vim. And yes, CtrlP is probably the thing you'll miss most. But all the other things I got from switching from Vim to Emacs+Evil easily outweigh the missing CtrlP. Vim was great, until I wanted to customize it heavily. It is simply not made to facilitate things like: child processes, SSH, understanding my code, a visual interface for Git.

Do one thing well. My text editor shouldn't be managing child processes or SSHing or trying to be a visual Git interface, and Vim does a great job displaying my code so I can understand it.
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