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Comment by stilley2 | Hacker News Reader

I gave emacs another try earlier this year. First vanilla, but then I missed vim keybindings so I installed evil. Then I switched to spacemacs. Eventually I decided I was barely using any emacs-specific features and just went back to vim. Vim feels so much snappier. I do miss some of the more ide features (jump to definition, execute selected code) but it wasn't worth the overhead, imho.

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> Vim feels so much snappier.

I am in kind of ranty mood, so forgive me if I take this opportunity to do a brain dump on you. Just to be clear, while I have my preference, I very much respect the fact other people will have different preferences. If vim makes you happy, by all means, use it!

I came full-circle, starting out with emacs, then discovering vim, then returning to emacs after a few years. Both are great editors. I love vi's command language, it is so concise and powerful. At work, I have been using Visual Studio a lot, recently, and installed the VsVim add-on, after looking for something emacs-like without success.

Vi rules because it is simply awesome at editing text; it is very Unix-y that way: Do one thing, but do it really well. I still use vi regularly to quickly edit a config file or something like that.

Emacs rules because it is awesome at integration. With emacs, I can write some Python code[1], start a Python REPL, load some of my code into the REPL and play around with it. Just as a simple example. I can start an SQL session for various RDBMS inside emacs buffers. The list goes on for as long as one can come up with new things to do inside emacs. The big payoff is that that all the muscle memory, all the keyboard shortcuts, all the hooks and customization work consistently across all those things.

This is also, why IMHO it takes a relatively long time for emacs to pay off, but once you reach that point, the payoff is phenomenal!

In Visual Studio, I am glad that I have VsVim: Intellisense is awesome, and VS is a great IDE, but the actual part of editing text, which is still a significant part of programming, kind of sucks. VsVim made that a lot better.

[1] Just an example, I have not actually written any Python code in years. But I think this more or less works for most languages that offer REPLs.

If there's one thing I will always be grateful to emacs for; it will be changing Caps Lock -> Ctrl

Life changing.

I completely agree, but I have the os do that. Except on my iPad where I am grateful for blink to have that capability.

On windows I had a special mode for caps lock via autohotkeys. Press and release meant esc. Press followed by another key and release was ctrl-key. I really liked that, but I couldn’t do it on Mac or iPad so I just settled on ctrl.

My old //e has control there naturally.

sure, i changed it at OS level too. maybe i should have wrote "introduce me to Caps Lock -> Ctrl"

The behaviour you have for Windows is available for Mac with Karabiner-Elements. It's tremendously helpful.

I haven’t looked at karabiner-elements for a while. Last I looked it wasn’t able to do what I needed. I’ll go have a peek.

I did the exact same thing. That's the same reason I do most dev work in vim as opposed to an IDE too--input lag jerks me out of flow state faster than anything else. Plus, vim emulation modes like evil and vscode vim don't duplicate all vim behavior, and if you've been using vim a while it doesn't take long at all to find the rough edges. Sure, vim isn't perfect, Lord knows vimscript is a dumpster fire, but for me at least, it is the best tool for the job 95% of the time.

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