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Comment by _skel | Hacker News Reader

One of the nice things about being an Emacs user (hang in there, I have a real point about Vim to make) is that the concepts (especially non-modal editing) and the keyboard shortcuts map well to newer IDEs.

I switch between IntelliJ and Emacs all day, and all I had to do to become comfortable is choose the Emacs keyboard preset in the IntelliJ preferences. The same is true for Eclipse and Visual Studio.

The Emacs paradigm is a lot more similar to contemporary IDEs than the Vim paradigm, and that makes it a lot easier to switch back and forth.

While a better Vim is a nice goal, I don't see how it will bridge the gap between Vim and newer editors/IDEs unless it includes some fairly fundamental changes to the Vim paradigm. But then it wouldn't be a better Vim -- it would be something different enough that Vim users probably wouldn't like it. I suspect that Vim and modern editors/IDEs are doomed to remain divergent forever.

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That's precisely what makes Kakoune interesting. There are tons of Emacs-alikes out there, environments that do what Emacs did in a more modern way. There are basically no Vim-alikes out there, things that take Vim's conceptual underpinnings and do them differently in a way that is unambiguously not Vim.

FWIW, I'm a 6-year Vim user, I have the same great experience using Jetbrains IDEs with the Vim presets.

I find that nearly all editors have VIM "mode" that will allow you to just use the vim key bindings, so it's not really a problem swapping between two editors. They tend to have an emacs mode as well, in case you're interested in using your emacs keys.

Unfortunately, this is superficially true but not in practice all that helpful for a lot of us. Most vim-style input modes or plugins for other editors are woefully lacking, and even very good ones (evil mode) seem to differ enough to be uncomfortable for a subset of long-term vim users.

Like: I've used Emacs extensively in the past, and certainly _could_ switch to evil if need be, but a few days of recent effort showed me that the switching costs are higher than I'm willing to pay right now, and it's not clear I'd be any better off in the end.

Whatever the infelicities of vim's implementation (there are certainly plenty), I think there's a tendency to underestimate the expressive nuance and (for lack of better words) complex texture of the interface.

I've been using vim for decades and use evil/emacs now.

It's simply not true that the vim modes outside of vim are critically lacking.

In fact almost all of them support text objects and the other key parts of the vim editing experience that we are talking about here and they do it well.

Some things like macros or perfect register support are not there (evil is pretty great though) but they generally have useful analogs.

This is across multiple IDE emulations that I've used.

What you said might have been true 6-7 years ago but is not true now.

It's still true, most won't even allow you to remap keys or work with the system clipboard like you can in vim. Nevermind things like proper scripting and window support.

I've used the vi style of editing with all IDEs over the years.. eclipse, visual studio, sublime and now atom. Oh, I also used vi style editing with Emacs :p (vim-mode or something)

Not just newer IDEs though. Many of the navigation mappings in emacs are the same in many terminal emulators, as well as pretty much every MacOS application. And although a little niche, Sam Aaron's Sonic Pi IDE is heavily influenced by emacs.

Just a quick note that I've been using Visual Studio and the VsVim plugin happily for years. They work great together. All the Vim-fu plus real keyword completion, jumping to definitions, instant renaming of any function/variable (VAX plugin) etc.

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