Hacker News Reader

Comment by zeveb | Hacker News Reader

I find it really amusing that the vim ecosystem is reinventing emacs, more slowly, in a worse language. There are some really amazing, really smart people (like Tim Pope), creating some really amazing, really cool software — I can only imagine how much more effective they'd be if they were working in a better environment.

View on HN

I’m tied to Windows at work. I’ve tried to start a few conversations about offering MacBooks as an option, but that never goes anywhere due to the additional upfront cost.

Given that constraint, I picked up Vim and have used it for the past 6 years. Tried Emacs at first, but it didn’t play well on Windows (not sure if user error!)

So I definitely encourage “reinventing the wheel” on multiple platforms, as long as the platform is popular enough. Competition doesn’t hurt.

Modal editing is just that good. ;-)

The thing that would get me to use Emacs is a plugin implementing Neovim's remote editing protocol. Vim is an incredibly deep state machine, and no plugins that reimplement it get things exactly right.

You can do remote file editing with local editor setting using Emacs TRAMP which when used with SSH profiles treats remote files as if they were local files.

If you love modal editing, as I do, you can use EVIL mode to emulate Vim quite well. I used Vim for years and switched within a month, most of the transition was in getting used to all the tools built into Emacs. Movement was identical, even things like text objects and Vim-surround work well.

The quality of Emacs packages are very high and almost always “just work”. And when you do have to read the documentation it’s very easy to find and understand.

By "remote editing protocol," I meant the Neovim RPC API which allows other editors or tools to run a Neovim server and get it's exact behavior, keystroke for keystroke. It's been a few years since I tried EVIL, but last time I ran into behavior differences within fifteen minutes (something about pane management? It's been a while). I don't want "almost exactly Vim," I want, "literally identical to Vim," as a starting point.

Sublime Text has a plugin which implements the API; it runs full blown vim plugins.

>Sublime Text has a plugin which implements the API; it runs full blown vim plugins.

.. .. I didn't realize the integration was that far along. I'll have to give Sublime another look.

I hear good things about evil-mode & viper for emacs. Dunno about Neovim's remote editing protocol though. TRAMP does the trick exceedingly well for me (to include 'remote' editing as root on the local machine, which is kinda awesome).

I have tried evil mode many times. It just doesn't work. It may be 99% faithful implementation of vim but I hit the missing 1% so often that I throw up my hands before quitting out to use the real thing.

Which parts of EVIL mode don’t work as you expect them to?

99% of ex commands don't work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com