What’s a good resource for learning emacs for someone who’s been using vim for more than 20 years?
But overall i prefer Spacemacs to vim for general development.
I recommend using the develop branch of spacemacs. It sometimes breaks but if there is something broken it gets fixed really fast, whereas if something is broken on master then it sometimes stays broken for a really long time.
Emacs keybindings are burned into my brain at this point, but if I had to do it again, I would probably go with spacemacs. I think modal editing is probably superior.
I'd recommend Spacemacs (even if you're not using evil) if you're new to Emacs and want to see how different and powerful a fully customized Emacs is when compared to the bare-bones experience of stock Emacs.
As many others have suggested, take a look at Evil, the best Vim emulation for any platform. Just ease your way into it by replacing Vim, then some other CLI programs, then figure out when to stop when the Emacs version is no better than what you were using before.
Also, the default theme is fantastic along with great defaults for key bindings.
I haven't tried distributions like spacemacs or doom-emacs (which is lighter-weight than spacemacs, with fewer abstractions above emacs). I think emacs is software which benefits from being well understood by the user, to the extent of "if something breaks I can fix it".
It may be fine for a very casual vim user who wants to switch to emacs but it's too confusing for a vim power user. There are subtle differences that disrupt the flow of my muscle memory. One such example is the }{ forward and reverse paragraph motion. In vim, this is perfectly predictable and delineated by empty lines. In evil-mode, however, it's hooked into the major mode, so it's always changing behaviour as you switch between different file types.
I use Emacs very casually, mainly just for writing in org mode with Evil, and have toyed with the idea of switching to it completely. But, if you could talk about the figurative holes you fell into as a vim expert that could help inform my decision down the road.
1. Search/replace behavior - Not that it is better or worse, just that it is different. 2. Misc. ex commands. I don't remember specifics. 3. Plugin specific commands. Not really fair to bring up, but still part of my muscle memory.
Long time vim user, switched to evil emacs. Works great, have zero issues with it.
I have actually found it hard to go back to vim because emacs has been much easier to customize and many of the features I use routinely are no longer in my vim config.