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Comment by maxaf | Hacker News Reader

I alternate between Emacs and Vim every 5 years or so. Emacs gave me superior customizability using a "real" programming language: elisp. Vim, on the other hand, offers a faster, more efficient editing UX. The older I get, the wider the spread becomes between the speed of my thought and the rate at which I can input editing commands into the terminal. Vim allows me achieve higher efficiency and to almost "think ahead" by quantifying my movements and jumping to specific tokens in known locations. That to me has become more important lately than scripting in a nicer language than viml.

All of the new features of Vim are super nice, but I'll still primarily use it for the terseness of its editing UX.

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You may want to consider looking at Evil mode, which gives you a very close approximation to the vim editing bindings in emacs. I've been using it as part of the spacemacs distribution for a while now and find it to be the best of both worlds.

Evil mode is slower than vim. And also you are in evil mode only during the editing phase. All other menus drop you back to default emacs keybindings and that is very painful experience. I used evil mode for a couple of years and still just went back to vim.

I have not found this to be the case with Spacemacs. Almost everything you need is bound to keystrokes using space as the leader key in the spirit of vim. As a long-time and fairly advanced vim user I recommend Spacemacs highly.

Don't you feel like you're pushing a square peg into a round hole? Or do you actually find yourself taking advantage of elisp in harmonious combination with Vim's editing UX?

In my experience it's cleaner than default emacs editing experience, but it's not as clean as you can get in plain vim.

I thought the same thing as you at first, as I was a vim+pathogen user. My workflow was working properly but to me it's just much simpler to do a SPC-f-e-d, add 'git' to my packages, then SPC-f-e-R and voila, git support is installed.

I'm sure I'll go back some day but for now Spacemacs is perfect for my use (i.e. writing small software, not large projects).

I was also using spacemacs for something like 2 month. After that I just rewrote my vim configuration with what I learned from spacemacs in mind. It's great and clean. But it's still emacs and vim emulation. Nowadays i'm much happier with my vim configuration partially thanks to spacemacs.

Can you share the things you took with you? I'm always interested in spicing up my vim experience.

Mostly key bindings. Space as a leader. Everything themed by prefix. Like <spc>mee to eval clojure form in repl. <scp>mek to show clojure documentation. <spc>cl - comment line. Switched to unite. Duplicated most used things from helm in unite. You can check out my github repo with vim configs at Gonzih/.vim on github.com

Personally my muscle memory adapted to this discrepancy, just as it did when starting with Vim (I started with Vim about 10 years ago and moved to Emacs+Evil about 3 years ago).

Now I'm somewhat the opposite, I expect everything else to have Emacs bindings, except when I'm directly editing code.

Spacemacs does a good job of _not_ dropping you back to emacs keybindings, though on occasion it still happens. I've not yet worked out how - my only recourse as someone who has never used Emacs without Spacemacs in Evil mode is to restart it...

The startup time compared to vim is painful, and the daemon mode on OS X appears not to work. For project work I use it heavily, but for quick edits still fall back to vim. I've yet to test whether neovim gets rid of the UI blocking that made vim so unusable for me though.

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