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Comment by generalk | Hacker News Reader

I've used Emacs for many years, and recently switched to Spacemacs, a set of configs that kind of takes over Emacs and puts a great platform on top of it.

I frequently describe Spacemacs as a better vim than vim. Don't get me wrong, I've used vim for ages; I'll never stop editing server config with vi, nor will I stop getting mad when vi is actually vi and not vim.

But for a day to day code editor? Spacemacs is astonishingly good.

(Of course, Spacemacs is built on top of EVIL, as well as dozens of other packages. On the shoulders of giants, as we say.)

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The problem with Emacs and all its modifications is that it cannot match Vim's flexible system for custom keybindings. And because of that Evil mode has the same limitation, beside its insistence to prefer using builtin Emacs functionality over emulating Vim behaviour correctly.

And the other thing that I could never get used to is that Emacs' terminals can't handle ncurses applications. I usually like to run Vim in a terminal multiplexer and combine it with various terminal utilities when needed, and Emacs doesn't support that - unless you run it in a terminal, but then Evil mode stops working properly...

I'm fine with Vim, but I'm glad I tried Emacs for a while because it does have some nice ideas.

M-x ansi-term

I have to agree. Emacs w/ Evil is a nice solution and gets almost there, but there are enough edge cases that interfere with the elegance of pure Vim. Everytime you install a new emacs plugin, you have to consider that it will use Emacs keybindings, not Vim, and you jump through hoops to remedy that, or, more often, you find yourself having to mix the emacs ways and the Vim way, which I personally found annoying after awhile.

Emacs is awesome and more powerful overall, but actually using Vim is easier -- from setting up keybindings, configuring your vimrc file, it's all quite simple compared to what you can do, and often do, in setting up Emacs.

But to be honest they are much closer to each other than either is to a more conventional/modern IDE. They are spiritual siblings for sure.

> The problem with Emacs and all its modifications is that it cannot match Vim's flexible system for custom keybindings.

Interesting, my impression was that custom keybindings was more flexible in Emacs + Evil than in Vim. It seemed easier to e.g. define new modes with separate keybindings, and if you use the GUI version, more distinct keybindings are available.

> And the other thing that I could never get used to is that Emacs' terminals can't handle ncurses applications.

It can now. The problem is that there are a lot of shells and terminals available in Emacs, so it's not always obvious which one supports what. But emacs-libvterm [1] is a "real" terminal inside Emacs, and supports ncurses apps well. (The website warns about being alpha level, but I used Emacs + Evil for about half a year, and it worked fine for me.)

[1]: https://github.com/akermu/emacs-libvterm

> I'm fine with Vim, but I'm glad I tried Emacs for a while because it does have some nice ideas.

I ended up with the same conclusion :).

> The problem with Emacs and all its modifications is that it cannot match Vim's flexible system for custom keybindings. And because of that Evil mode has the same limitation

Can you explain what limitations you mean? What keybindings has vim over emacs?

> And the other thing that I could never get used to is that Emacs' terminals can't handle ncurses applications.

libvterm seems to have solved this problem recently. Works well enough that I can use vim inside emacs.

Wait until you find out about Doom, which I consider to be all the good of Spacemacs without the crust.

Have you taken a look at Doom Emacs? I liked Spacemacs, but I found Doom more performant, as well as not abstracting too much, which allows you to slowly learn Emacs as you go.

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