Hacker News Reader

Comment by evanrmurphy | Hacker News Reader

I was a vim user and made the switch to Emacs. After finding out about Viper [1] I had to try it. If what you love about vim is the genius key bindings and modal editing, you don't really have anything to lose.

In that sense, you could say I never did switch to Emacs, since I never really got fluent in the default key bindings for basic editing in Emacs (always use the vim/Viper ones). So when I'm in an unfamiliar environment that doesn't have my personalizations, I still load up vi or vim before Emacs. :)

---

[1] http://www.delorie.com/gnu/docs/emacs/viper.html

View on HN

This is actually a common overstatement of the benefits of Emacs. The beauty of vim besides the modal editing approach is its lightweight footprint. While Emacs may be able to replicate the keybindings and modes, it cannot match the file load times or memory usage of vim. The reason I continue to use vim is because I edit dozens of files a day. I am in and out of my editor 50 times a day, Emacs just can not and does not support this approach.

I'm a vim user, not an Emacs user (though I have dabbled with emacs before). If you still use vim on the console, you can do a lot better.

There's a reason why vim has support for multiple buffers. That you can keep multiple files open simultaneously. Read about vim remoting, and you can use a single gvim instance (which offers better performance and font rendering), and edit all files in just that.

Even in emacs, buffers are everything. Nobody opens a new instance of emacs for each file.

Actually years ago I discovered one bewildered undergrad would run Emacs to edit a single source file, control-Z out of it, run the compiler from the shell, test, start another Emacs (after all, the shell announced the previous Emacs was "stopped"), lather-rinse-repeat until the shared host had finally died under the weight of all the suspended Emacs processes.

To sum up, nobody sane opens a new Emacs for each file. VISUAL=emacsclient is your friend, as are Dired and M-x compile....

> I am in and out of my editor 50 times a day, Emacs just can not and does not support this approach.

This is true. I think the typical approach with Emacs is to leave 1 instance open for a long period of time and just keep coming back to it. (This is what I do, anyway.) I don't think this is any worse in general than opening and closing the editor as needed, it's just different. Especially when you consider that you can run terminals/shells within Emacs, it's a completely inside-out workflow. Instead of:

1. do a bunch of stuff at the terminal

2. need to edit a file

3. open my editor

Once you've gotten to step 2 you're already in your editor!

I guess it boils down to what you prefer using. Emacs is my shell, filebrowser, ftp client etc. Having a standard UI for all your text editing is pretty amazing. After all, everything inside a CLI is just text.

I run up an emacs server on startup and use emacs client to connect to it. It gives me the instant on of VI, plus the power of all the plugins and tweaks I've made to my emacs config.

These days, most coders using vim or gvim have a pretty large config setup which takes as long as emacs to startup anyway.

I tried viper, and even customized it to be more like vim, but still run into issues, e.g.: * If I hit escape followed by <something> it often doesn't do what I want * Various major modes lose the vi keybindings

Reply on news.ycombinator.com