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Comment by mmcgaha | Hacker News Reader

Having features and having features that serve a groups needs at the right time are different things.

The first time I fired up emacs was in 1995 on a pentium 66 with 8 MB of RAM. It made my computer grind to a halt so editing text was not going to happen. When I tried vi, it ran like I expected a text editor to run.

So here I am today, my fingers long trained up to use vi, and I find little need to learn emacs. Sure emacs has had useful features for years, but the barrier to entry was just too high, and now it is too late to win over folks like me.

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But why is it to late? Evil mode works perfectly. I think you would find the transition quite easy.

It works fine as a vim emulation layer, but as a full replacement for vim it does no better than other vim emulations, like IdeaVim. For example, in vim I can hit : to open command line mode followed by ctrl + f to open a mini buffer for ex commands that can be manipulated like any other vim buffer. I use this feature all the time in vim and it isn't available in any of the vim emulation software I've tried. Now, I'm sure there are plenty of ways to accomplish the same goal in emacs, not disputing that. But the idea that evil mode can simply replace vim and all of its built in functionality? Just not true, at least not currently.

Evil can function in the minibuffer too which is somewhat similar. Regardless, the idea that Evil is no better than IdeaVim is kind of ridiculous.

Isn't that the same as q: (you know, such as there is q: , q/ and q?)? In which case, evil implements this as "evil-command-window-ex", which I'm sure you could bind to ctrl + f too (perhaps that should be filed as an issue with evil).

But I'm equally sure that if you made a habit of using e.g. spacemacs, you probably would not need to use it all the time either. But I guess I don't know your workflow. Why do you even use that buffer? I curse every time I accidentally open it.

I use it for the same reason I use bash history--to view, edit, and reuse ex commands. I'm not surprised that there is a way to customize evil to get to something similar, but my point was that it doesn't work out of the box the way vim does. I've no doubt that it could be implemented, and could file an issue as you suggest, but as someone who uses vim as my daily driver all I can say is every time I fire up evil I run into something like that which immediately turns me off. I guess I just don't have enough appetite for customizing my editor to take up emacs. Just noticed that :h doesn't open the vim help (of course, why should it, this is emacs), but there again, something I use several times a day. I could go on. A big reason I haven't tried harder is that there is no easy path to converting an existing .vimrc to elisp, and over the years I've spent enough time configuring vim to work just the way I want.

If Evil mode or Spacemacs worked perfectly I'd have switched a long time ago. But based on my experience with it I'd say it would take me months of practice and configuration just to get the same experience. And for what? Just so I can do the same things in just one program instead of two(Vim + terminal)? Not worth it for me.

Besides, as long as hitting the Escape key feels like sending messages in morse code I don't think I'll ever get used to it.

Maybe it’s not worth it, and I get that (but learning is fun and makes you smarter!). But Emacs can do much more than vim+Terminal. Debugging, git integration, psychiatrists, pong, Tetris, an awesome calculator that can do integrals and derivatives, etc etc. Also web browsing (you can embed WebKit inside), a full blown window manager (you can embed X apps in it), org-mode (which is amazing), in-line images, equations, flash cards, music player, movie editor, file manager, and much much more.

Emacs is the greatest application I’ve ever used, bar none. I’ve tried vim, and it doesn’t even come close.

I'm curious if you really think Vim or the terminal can't do any of these things, because it doesn't take long to find replacements for almost all of them(e.g. it's no problem to get image previews with ranger running in Vim). Except the ones that only exist because it's possible and not because it makes sense. Why should I care that a text editor can run a web browser or a music player? Does it bring any additional value except an opportunity for bragging?

Trying to adapt Emacs for me coming from Vim feels like recreating Alpine Linux by modifying an Ubuntu installation: it's pointless, cumbersome and feels insane.

Saying that emacs is more powerful than terminal is annoying and stupid argument. You can have everything you just listed without any hassle, so why are you trying to impose emacs on others in the flame-war way?

Aside from org mode, I can do the same things with different applications. I don't want one big application that does everything. In any case, I don't extol the virtues of vim in emacs-related posts.

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