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Comment by pmontra | Hacker News Reader

Partially offtopic. The author is doing

> "complex edits [in Emacs] using Vim macros"

This is a big surprise. I left vi for emacs in the early '90s when vi's macros were crippled, to say the least. I'm using vim for quick edits, mainly on servers or configuration files (sudo vi /etc/something). Did vim macros really become better than Emacs' ones?

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Vim's macros are super easy to record and play back, repeatedly. It's the one thing I'll still use evil mode for.

Emacs isn't that much worse, vim is just faster and easier.

Exactly this. I have the muscle memory built so I can just bang out the macro really fast, and evil lets it contain a mix of vim or emacs commands.

The author is actually just using Emacs macros with vim-style keybindings. Emacs macros are still probably more powerful.

Vim's macros are certainly more quickly composable. I still use them in emacs via evil using execute-kbd-macro:

   ;; select the current graph
   (execute-kbd-macro (kbd "ma{y}`a"))

Same here, I use vim for editing a single file (often scripts or configs), always in a terminal.

For editing multiple files (mostly code) or a project folder, I use emacs with X11.

not sure about "better", but i'm curious what was crippling back then? using them nowadays is a breeze and you get practically full functionality at your disposal.

You could have one macro per time and you had to type it in like this

:maappend chars to end of line( * )Jf:D

Then ^N to execute it, I think.

( * ) I don't remember how we quoted ESC

When I saw that emacs could record macros while I was typing that immediately sold me the editor. Multibuffer and multifile were nice features too.

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