Hacker News Reader

Comment by jgilias | Hacker News Reader

Decided to try Doom Emacs a few days ago as a long-time Vim user.

Man...

Any comparison between the two is completely besides the point. Vim is a great text editor that one can extend. Emacs is a computing environment that happens to revolve around text. The tools are simply in different categories altogether.

View on HN

As a long-time (decades) vi user, I decided once to force myself to use Emacs for a full year just to see what people liked about it. I have to tell you - I was so relieved when my year was up and I could go back to vi. I never "felt" emacs no matter how much time I spent using it.

I was a knowledgeable emacs user and felt the same thing when I finally started using vi. Emacs is like carrying around a foreign OS to do text editing. Vi is a tool that has been designed to blend into the system.

Vi is the editor of the Unix programming environment (among other things the shell). Emacs is a shell, that introduces a different kind of programming environment. The OS is still Unix, it's wrong to say that it is it's own thing, but you relate to it differently, but neither is inherintly "better" fit for *nix in the abstract, it's just that the shell is more popular since it was historicall the default UI.

VI is a text editing language, and the VIM and NeoVIM implementations are terrific.

Emacs is a text editing platform, but its text editing language is good for writing only. Not good for editing, not good for copying or moving code, not good for navigating, not good for working with brackets or parenthesis despite the lisp language being almost native to Emacs.

My recent exploration into org-mode introduced me to Evil. It's 95% of the VI language, in an amazing text editing platform. I'm currently only using Emacs for org-mode right now, but suddenly new worlds are opening. For instance, I've been looking for a good tool to navigate CSV files from the CLI (or any other keyboard-controlled environment) for over two decades. I'm not yet explored the possibilities with Emacs, but I'm told they are good. Then possibly browsing simple websites, such as HN and Wikipedia, maybe a better Git interface, maybe a good Telegram / Slack / IRC combined messenger, maybe a good email reader.

Suggestions welcome!

> Not good for editing, not good for copying or moving code, not good for navigating, not good for working with brackets or parenthesis

Hmm. OK, I wonder why. For me M-h selects a a paragraph. Repeated M-h selects further. M-w copies it. S-M-{ or S-M-} to jump by paras.

M-s . for symbol lookup. In that family you can do highlight regexp or line.

M-s o - get an overview of every line that matches what you want ('occurs')

etc. etc.

Macros, registers (using these to store large chunks of text, basically class templates). etc.

Thank you. I would love nothing more that to be proven wrong! Some common things that I do in VIM:

  * Copy or cut everything between these quotes / parenthesis / brackets.
  * Delete up until the next X character. Now delete up until the next X character again.
  * Cut these rows then paste them over there.
  * Change all instances of "foo" to "bar".
  * Show all lines with (or without) "foo".
  * Reformat a line like so, now do it to the 351 line following it.
  * Reindent this section of text.
  * Go to the beginning of this if() / method / loop.
  * Go the the file where this Python / PHP class is defined.
  * In markdown files, open this hyperlink
  * Search for the first occurrence of this token in this method.
  * Search for the next occurrence of this word (actually learned to do this today, for the most part)

These were just example off the top of my head in a few seconds, none of which had an easy answer in Emacs. Sure, I could spend ten minutes each to look for how to do each one. I probably did that during the Clinton administration with VIM, before one could just google their problems away. But in VIM, each one has an easy answer and most are actually built right into VIM with no customization necessary. In Emacs, I could implement that stuff but then I'll be implementing everything else I need.

So I use Evil!

Hmm. This is tricky and I'm not sure I completely get your requirements, but let me try. Other emacs dudes will need to step in. In the following no customisation needed as I don't use elisp.

  Copy or cut everything between these quotes / parenthesis / brackets.

Don't know. Never needed to. Trivial with a macro

  Delete up until the next X character. Now delete up until the next X character again.

Never used it but https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Ot... M-z char - Kill through the next occurrence of char (zap-to-char).

  Cut these rows then paste them over there.

Well, select rows, kill, move to new place, yank. Not sure what else you want.

  Change all instances of "foo" to "bar".

M-S-% - query replace (and variations such as regexp)

  Show all lines with (or without) "foo".

Erm can only do with, but as in original post, M-s o (occurs)

  Reformat a line like so, now do it to the 351 line following it.

Not sure your requirements but command align-regexp works for me. Don't know what else you want.

  Reindent this section of text.

Depends on mode, but select text then TAB key.

  Go to the beginning of this if() / method / loop.

Don't know. Perhaps Search reverse for { char?

  Go the the file where this Python / PHP class is defined.

Mode specific. I'd be pretty sure that kind of functionality doesn't come built into vim. I use Omnisharp which does similar but it's an external package.

  In markdown files, open this hyperlink

mode specific. Presumably also in Vim?

  Search for the first occurrence of this token in this method.

Just search forward. That may not be quite what you want, maybe.

  Search for the next occurrence of this word (actually learned to do this today, for the most part)

M-s . when on symbol. Subsequently C-s search forward, C-r searches reverse (backward).

But I'm not trying to change your mind, use what suits best.

Edit: M-S h is highlight-regexp which highlights all matches in the buffer in colour (does depend one some mode stuff, but works in most modes).

  > But I'm not trying to change your mind, use what suits best.

Quite the opposite, I very much appreciate the engagement. You have likely saved me a few hours as I do intend to learn how to use Emacs properly.

Some of the things I see that I was not clear about, but I do not need to belabour and now I've got some great headstarts on the rest. You are correct, some of the functionality mentioned are in fact provided in VIM via plugins.

Thank you.

That's a lovely reply! The problem with emacs is there is just too much, and the chaff obscures the wheat. It frustrates me too, as there's some really good stuff there that I don't know about.

Suggest grabbing the emacs book https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/learning-gnu-emacs/0596... and/or the emacs manual from https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/ (free pdf) and go through them. They will repay the time!

Good luck and remember any pro emacs user will trip themselves up to help newbies learn!

Thanks for the book suggestions. Emacs is a way of life!

  > Good luck and remember any pro emacs user will trip
  > themselves up to help newbies learn!

I've noticed this. The Emacs community is one of the most welcoming tech communities that I've seen, and have helped accelerate my learning curve tremendously. Thank you.

A couple more - look at C-x 3 (split screen vertically) the issue command follow-mode. You can have several vertical views next to each other, all shiowiing a contiguous view of your code - very nice! a bit flaky sometimes but incredibly useful.

C-x 2 - split window horizontally - bloody useful.

Get used to macros if you haven't already.

Issue part of a command then ? for help eg. M-s ? gives you a family of stuff inc the aforementioned occurs command.

Look up registers. Dead handy. Also look at (IIRC) Bookmark+ (?) which allows you to save your desktop config then reloads it next time you start up.

Thank you! Almost everything that you mention look very useful for my use cases. In fact, my monitor sits in portrait mode, so I do use horizontal splits in other programs as well.

> Not good for editing

I knew Emacs wasn't the editor for me when I found out that there isn't, by default, a way to quickly duplicate a line. Of course, the emacs community says that adding this feature is a simple matter of defining a macro in your emacs config file. Very different mindset.

A huge part of why I've come to like it is because I use the Doom configuration that comes with sane and very usable defaults out of the box. A Vim user can hit the ground running with it.

I don't think I could've persisted long enough had I tried using a vanilla GNU Emacs.

I hit a wall, then hit the ground, then got up but now I seem to be hobbling along fine enough with my attempt to use Doom. It’s just that there’s no simple intro to the emacs paradigm so I find myself almost constantly confused when something doesn’t go as expected. It’s been... a month or two now? I do like the spacebar leader key though.

Of course there is a way to duplicate a line in Emacs by default. Like in vi, you compose simple commands.

Let's see:

  ; Duplicates the current line
  S-C-backspace C-[y y]

  ; Duplicates the current line
  C-[a k k y y]

  ; Duplicates the current line
  C-[a SPC n w y y]

  ; Duplicates the current line
  C-[a SPC n] ESC w C-y

Repeat duplicating until it looks like enough:

  ; Duplicate again until happy
  C-[y y y...]

  ; Duplicate again until happy
  C-x z z z...

Duplicate 3 lines instead of 1:

  ; Duplicate this line and the next two
  C-[a u] 3 C-[k y y]

Duplicate 10 times:

  ; Duplicate the current line 10 times
  C-[a k k] C-x ( C-y C-x ) C-u 10 C-x e

  ; Duplicate the current line 10 times
  C-[a SPC n w] C-x ( C-y C-x ) C-u 10 C-x e

  ; Duplicate the current line 10 times
  S-C-backspace C-x ( C-y C-x ) C-u 10 C-x e

Remove duplicate lines instead:

  ; Select region, then
  M-x delete-duplicate-lines

Thank you very much!

That's probably the best succinct summary of the differences I've seen. You've definitely got a better mental model of Emacs than I did when I first started using it. Welcome to the Emacs party! I hope you like it here. :)

I like thinking of Emacs as a running Lisp REPL that fires off different functions depending on what key I press. If you haven't seen this already yet, run `C-h k` (describe-key) which will tell you the Emacs Lisp function behind a particular keystroke. You can then call that function directly with `M-: (emacs-function-here) RET`.

I got really far in reading the comments in response to this before I realized Doom Emacs wasn't an implementation of the video game in emacs lisp.

Haha!

In think they called it that way because you do use the space key very often. Much like in the game.

This.

Exactly what I thought when I switched from Vim to Emacs a few days ago. They are not comparable, I was mind blown when discovering Emacs. Of course the first thing I installed was Evil, but they are two entirely different beasts indeed!

Enjoy your emacs journey mate ;)

You too! I already see myself sticking with it. Not that I'd delete my .vimrc though. That is still the preferred choice to just 'quickly edit this file here'.

> Emacs is a computing environment that happens to revolve around text.

And it’s usually embedded in another computing environment that happens to revolve around text called UNIX. If only the scripting language of the latter was as elegant as Lisp...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com