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Comment by binaryapparatus | Hacker News Reader

"Exobrains, on the other hand, stuff Vim full of plugins, functions, and homebrew mappings in a vain attempt to pretend they’re using Emacs."

This is disturbingly accurate from my point of view. I keep wondering if I should finally jump ship and stop tweaking vim with questionable results. Spacemacs? Pure emacs + evil? Suggestions welcome.

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I particularly prefer doom-emacs [1]. I migrated from Vim to Spacemacs, however doom-emacs is leaner, faster and has better evil integration. For example, Spacemacs has no mapping for evil-numbers, however doom-emacs maps it to Ctrl+A (increase number) and Ctrl+Shift+A (decrease number) [2].

However, you will probably need to do some customizations in doom-emacs. Spacemacs works mostly only using its internal layers, however when you try to do something that isn't included already... Well, it is less than optimal. doom-emacs assumes that you will want to customize things.

[1]: https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs/

[2]: And as for why it isn't Ctrl+X to decrease number like in Vim, it is because Ctrl+X is probably the most important keymapping in Emacs itself. However I find Ctrl+Shift+A quite good because it follows the Vim convention of the reverse of some operation is on Shift.

I recently moved from Spacemacs to Doom. I second, that it’s so much better, in that it’s faster, leaner, and easier to comprehend. Some of the keybindings could be more thorough. I find myself M-x’ing a lot. I take this as an acceptable trade off, as keybindings are easy to set on one’s own.

I like it because it is easier to add than remove. Spacemacs has so many language specifics keybindings that, while taking less time to be productive, also makes customization much harder thanks to the multiple conflicts that you will probably get when trying to map something.

However this is the trade-off. You have to spend more time in doom-emacs, however there is less friction to customize.

Great tip, thanks, trying it now. Seems nicer and easier to tweak than spacemacs, from my perspective.

Spacemacs is peanut butter meets chocolate. Apps like Magit and org-mode with vi's modal editing are truly superior.

Even when I am using Xcode or some ide that requires I use it, I still pop open Magit in Spacemacs. Love it.

The discover ability of Spacemacs is really second to none and makes it much faster to learn and keep learning.

Spacemacs is Nutella to keep the analogy going...

I write primarily Python. Pycharm+vim bindings has been quite a pleasure in my experience. I still primarily use straight up vim with little to no mods for editing one-offs and isolated scripts.

Interesting, I don't often use Python but recent project had few 3000+ lines .py files, which make Vim _very_ unresponsive when editing. Other languages weren't so problematic but Python code is what made me look at Emacs direction at the first place.

This surprises me. How does it make vim unresponsive? I frequently open multi-GB sql files without vim choking. Are you using some particular plugins?

I was using/am using:

    Plug 'tmhedberg/SimpylFold'
    "Plug 'python-mode/python-mode', { 'branch': 'develop' }
    "let g:pymode_python = 'python3'

... in different combinations. Deleting any char takes surprising amount of time, so much so that I usually mark block to delete instead of char by char even if it is three char block. Of course I may be using wrong plugins, however that's what I found that should be used in various articles online.

Sorry to hear that. Might be worth reporting to the plugin authors, as I don’t think it’s an inherent issue with vim. When editing the sql files I’m referring, it includes syntax highlighting, etc. so I would assume it should work just fine in other cases. But I’m not really dealing with large py files, in general, so I can’t say specifically.

I've made this request before but I would pretty interested in learning emacs the emacs way (rather than trying to emulate vim in emacs). Maybe leveraging my experience with vim in the sense that I don't need to learn what an editor is or shall basics.

Something that starts from bare(ish) emacs, includes emacs lisp, and gradually adds in plugins sort of like how this post does it but maybe more comprehensive and less individual tricks oriented.

Frankly, personally I don't see a particular reason to use Emacs bindings. Afaict it's mostly just “study this flight manual and then do what it says,” simply more hotkeys in the same old editing paradigm.

Meanwhile, there's every reason to use Vim's bindings, as they specifically sidestep the ‘move cursor and then type’ approach. Besides, with Evil you'll still have plenty of Emacs chords to do for stuff that's not in Vim.

Evil makes the transition from vim manageable, but once I was sufficiently far down the rabbit hole, I found I was consistently having to tweak and hack to keep evil working...eventually I bit the bullet and gave vanilla emacs bindings a shot, and haven’t looked back. YMMV, of course, and spacemacs comes highly rated.

But at the very least, they’re both good gateway drugs to get your first hit of the hard stuff

A different data point:

After using vim for about 20 years, I switched to emacs+evil about 10 to 15 years ago.. and spent a lot of time in the first 5 years or so tweaking stuff. Things have mostly stabilized in the last 5 years, and I still use evil.

One thing that helped me a ton was using hydra. Whenever I install a new mode or package, I bind all of its useful functions to hydras. Hydra and evil allow me to keep all virtually all my bindings vim-like.

I tried the switch a couple times. A few times with spacemacs, a few times with trying to write my own config from scratch with evil. Not sure what it is, maybe the way emacs configs are setup but I found vim just so much easier for me to manage with less magic and more predictability.

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