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Comment by nunez | Hacker News Reader

I used to be a heavy emacs user but decided to just learn vim because vi is practically available on everything whereas emacs isn't. The investment paid off big time. Unfortunately, I forgot my way around emacs, which can make it difficult on systems where emacs is the default EDITOR.

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Honestly, I've never learned to do more than the basics in Vi(m) -- for most of my career, if I needed to make significant changes, I was working locally and had access to something more modern.

But pretty much everyone needs to be able to, say, open a file and change a DB connection string in vi. It's like a survival skill.

I only started using emacs in the last few years, which is super weird for someone my age (48). It was orgmode that sold me, and once I was using it for that, it was easier to do other things in it, too.

If you have SSH connection to the server then you can do all your editing on your own computer with Tramp in Emacs and it applies your changes remotely.

So emacs being installed on a server or not is not really a reason to drop it, because you are not restricted to tools on the server.

While I agree with you, if you have SSH access then you've opened up yourself to a lot of possibilities by simply mounting the remote directory in your local.

SSH is not the only method Tramp supports:

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/tramp/Co...

It might be more practical to learn just enough vim to be able to edit files efficiently, and stay as an Emacs expert, if you are one already.

It doesn't have to be one or the other; the brain is surprisingly elastic. After a few months of training I can edit files efficiently in vim and Emacs with both querty and dvorak keymaps. That's 4 different mappings to keep in your head, but surprisingly I can do it, and I'm not particularly fast at learning new stuff.

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