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Comment by plgs | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: How does Emacs help with this particular problem ?

I feel like with every editor, it involves repeatedly hitting J, Ctrl+N or down arrow, which is inefficient. Do you have a way to get to a particular line that does not force you to think too much about how to get there ?

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Of course we do: You can jump by searching for line contents with C-s, you can do an operation a certain number of times with M-<number> <operation>, and do an operation four times with C-u <operation>, which chains, so you can do an operation 16 times with C-u C-u <operation>.

If you want to jump to a specific line number, you can use M-g M-g <number>, or (because C-u also provides numerical arguments) C-u <number> M-g M-g.

Finally, many motion commands set the mark, so you can use C-x C-x to return to where you were and select all text between your previous and current locations.

Oh, and if you want something even better, you can use C-` to jump to the location of compiler error if you use M-x compile, you can use ag.el or helm-ag for ag integration, Ace-Jump, which is similar to EasyMotion, built-in exuberant ctags integration (and a built-in ctags clone, etags), packages for cscope integration (if you're using C), and fiinally semantic, which provides a variety of parser-based tooling if it's supported by your language.

But you can also just use C-n, etc. and we won't judge you for it.

> "But you can also just use C-n, etc. and we won't judge you for it."

This is probably the biggest selling point of the Emacs community. They're not going to try to guilt or shame you into using more efficient or more advanced commands. If C-n works for you, use it!

Of course. We can't judge you. Your configuration and setup is likely so different that unless we meet up in person, it's impossible to tell who is more efficient.

Wait, how’s this different from Vim? You can use :<number> to go to a line and C-o to return to where you were.

It's really not different, except that we have more, better options for how to go about it. The difference is, you can just use C-n, and nobody will complain that you're doing it wrong. Well, not too much, anyways.

Sounds like the options are the same. Note that it isn’t some kind of Vim standard that j shouldn’t be used repeatedly, just this author’s opinion. I do it all the time.

Does vim have the ability to jump to compiler errors, ctags integration, cscope integration, and integration with sourcecode parser based tooling?

> How does Emacs help with this particular problem?

What, inefficiency? Inefficiency wasn't the problem. The problem was having to focus too much of my mind on how to use the editor. Muscle memory is invaluable, and Vim just doesn't let my muscle memory take over if I keep having to think about what's the most "efficient" way to move around or change text. Emacs lets my muscle memory take over easily. I just hit C-n or M-S-] a lot. It's inefficient, sure. But who cares? I never realize I'm doing it, and I never feel blocked having to wait until I get to the line I want to.

Normal vim users aren't thinking about the most efficient way to perform an edit, but rather just go with muscle memory. Said vim users also don't write blog articles on how to be more efficient with vim.

Well after 5 years of using Vim, the muscle memory for more efficient operations never kicked in. I was either holding "h" and "l" to move around, or I was consciously thinking of the more efficient combined operations like "f.ce.com^[". And that conscious thinking was very distracting from the actual code I was editing.

I used vim for everyday use for almost ten years before I realized that navigating around with the keyboard would never be as good as clicking a mouse. All the mental overhead of trying to be efficient with vim, for me at least, ended up being a bit of a false oasis.

I happily switched to Sublime for two years and then VS Code. I still use emacs with Clojure though.

Emacs is unbeatable for editing lisp code. Geiser, Quack, SLIME, and CIDR are all excellent.

Similar story here. I use IntelliJ for Java and Emacs for Clojure. We're porting our codebase from Clojure to Java at work, so soon it'll all be IntelliJ, which will be pretty sweet. I do kinda miss Paredit, but IntelliJ makes up for it with lots of other pretty sweet features.

Out of interest did you try using the Vim plugins for Clojure?

I'm only playing, but found a good set-up with vim-fireplace; vim-clojure-highlight; vim-sexp; Vim-sexp-mappings-for-regular-people; vim-surround and luochen1990/rainbow

What prevents you from using vim inefficiently in the same manner?

> The problem was having to focus too much of my mind on how to use the editor. Muscle memory is invaluable, and Vim just doesn't let my muscle memory take over if I keep having to think about what's the most "efficient" way to move around or change text.

IME, you do develop muscle memory in terms of using more "efficient" ways of navigation and text manipulation after using vim for a while. I guess it's sort of like learning how to drive a vehicle equipped with a manual transmission. At first, you're thinking more about how to shift through the gears and use the clutch. After a while, you don't really think about it too much while you're still doing it. After driving a bit longer, you start to get a feel about which gear to choose for a given traffic situation.

So, similarly, you get a feel about which keybinding to use to change certain types of text or do certain movements without having to think too much about it.

1. place hand on mouse

2. move mouse cursor to desired position

3. click mouse

If you're just looking to put the cursor somewhere you can see, this is actually quite quick.

:set mouse=a

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