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Comment by zeveb | Hacker News Reader

At some point, neovim is going to have every feature of emacs, only with fewer decades of testing and written in a worse language.

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I love Emacs, and I've used it for years, but this is an insanely unfair summary.

NeoVim can be trivially extended in any language. They're putting a lot of effort into making sure that the msgpack protocol supports basically everything. This means that, unlike in Emacs, it's straightforward to write extensions in whatever language is best for the job--something really, really important when it comes to language bindings themselves, which is probably the main thing I frequently find myself extending in Emacs in the first place. So saying it's written in a worse language seems bizarre to me.

NeoVim also, unlike Emacs, is cleanly split into a frontend and a backend so that its editing core can be used in different contexts. Combined with the above, that means you will eventually (hopefully) be able to get "the real" NeoVim in lots of apps, rather than either a kind of broken "Emacs mode" (like in IntelliJ, NetBeans, and Emacs) or having to do this weird "save a text blob to disk, open in Emacs, wait for it to be closed, reload in the app" dance. Already, this separation has allowed the creation of NyaoVim (https://github.com/rhysd/NyaoVim), a browser-based front-end that I could imagine being incredibly useful for remote editing, whether in a cloud-like environment (e.g. Cloud9, CodeAnywhere) or on a remote server.

Emacs is great. NeoVim is also heading in an excellent direction. You don't have to give it a chance, but you also don't need to be so dismissive.

* it's straightforward to write extensions in whatever language is best for the job--something really*

Although this is great, this sounds like it can cause a lot fragmentation, everyone writing plugins with their favorite language and consumers having to deal with the pain of multiple runtimes.

Is there a preferred language endorsed by the project?

Lua, I think.

> This means that, unlike in Emacs, it's straightforward to write extensions in whatever language is best for the job...

Lisp is the best language for the job!

Yeah I don't see why one would want to write extensions in anything but lisp. Lisp is way more powerful and straightforward! :)

I use both a lua-configured mail-client, and a lisp-configured emacs. Of the two they're both powerful and extensible, but the Lua config feels more natural to me.

Hmmm but does the mail-client let you load code in without restart?

The Lua also might feel more natural just because of having used imperative languages more.

It can do - there is a trivial eval(read_input()) facility baked in.

https://github.com/lumail/lumail2/

Any romanticism you may hold for emacs' implementation is easily defeated by taking a quick stroll through the codebase.

I still reach for emacs over vim most days, but it is a huge mess under the hood.

I came here to say the same. And me a vim user with high hopes for neovim. Maybe it's time to give evil-mode another try.

I've used Vim exclusively for 12 years. Over those 12 years I tried switching to Emacs no fewer than 5 times. The longest it stuck was 3 months, and I still felt a huge weight lift from my shoulders when I switched back to Vim.

6 months ago I switched to spacemacs and haven't looked back since.

My story is similar to yours. Spacemacs really is the best of both worlds: the Emacs ecosystem of packages combined with good defaults and without carpal-tunnel inducing keybindings.

Thank you for this! I'm trying it now. It feels much more familiar than my previous attempts at using evil-mode, and seems to work nicely even in a terminal window.

I just tried evil mode a few days ago and felt blown away by it. May I ask what problems you ran into? I believe you, and I'm trying to find out what to watch out for.

My problem was mucking around with regular emacs stuff whenever I was trying to get into evil-mode or out of emacs. 17 years of vim muscle-memory trips me up every time I try to recall the magic combination of keys that does what I want. I never made it far enough to use emacs to modify my emacs configuration and enable evil-mode by default. Spacemacs seems to make this a lot easier by setting up evil-mode for you. It also replaces all of the control-this and meta-that with hitting the spacebar in while you're in command mode.

Maybe I've got too many layers enabled but I just had that feeling of relief because Spacemacs was just too slow.

Yeah, eshell is great, and emacs "windows" are pretty excellent panes. And it's so useful that buffers are independent of the windows they're in. I've been writing Clojure full time in Emacs with Cider and paredit for a little over 3 years now, and I feel like I'm more productive than ever before.

I am personally still partial to ansi-term over eshell, the only thing I wish it had was 256 color support, unfortunately integrating https://github.com/atomontage/xterm-color with it does not seem possible and the xterm-color author appears not to be continuing to work on their rewrite https://github.com/atomontage/xterm-color/issues/2

this said as much as I've been using emacs since forever (more recently also with evil-mode occasionally) I am really happy to see neovim gain better terminal support, because my usage of emacs skyrocketed when I discovered I could use it as a terminal replacement, and I am sure that vim users will take advantage the same way

I have actually investigated running emacs -nw inside neovim terminal (as a reverse-alternative to evil-mode, because I doubt org-mode will become available in neovim any time soon), but last time I tried it it wasn't working that great due to meta etc. not being passed successfully to the terminal, there was an issue open on this so it probably will be fixed at some point

> but last time I tried it it wasn't working that great due to meta etc. not being passed successfully to the terminal

That was fixed in January. Works perfectly now (and is covered by regression tests).

awesome, thanks for confirming, I will give it a try again (haven't updated for a bit)

neovim doesn't have much on top of what vim has; it has async plugins and a terminal, in a lot less code than vim is constructed from, and everything else is external. It has less testing because it's been around less time and this would be an equally pointless criticism of any new piece of software. Your last thing was just an opinion that one may or may not agree with.

But also with fewer decades of cruft and legacy code.

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