Hacker News Reader

Comment by anamexis | Hacker News Reader

Why not use emacs with vim bindings?

I can't speak for others, but for me it comes down to work flow, vim is always 2 keystrokes away and starts instantly, and sane configuration defaults (my definition of sanity anyway..) it is available on all hosts I frequent and behaves predictably without having to sync extensive configurations.

I once tried Vim with the expectation that it would reduce keystroke count, but found that to be largely exagerated. As an example:

save in Vim:

  [esc] : w enter

3 or 4 keystrokes involving two hands.

save in emacs:

  C-x-s

one 3 fingered chord with the left hand.

And then I missed all the depth provided by emacs modes, perforce integration, org mode etc etc.

For me, emacs is also 2 keystrokes away and starts instantly (as long as the daemon is already running). Doom emacs has sane (good!) defaults.

My main valid gripe with emacs is the slow rendering engine.

I agree - whenever I'm on any remote host, I just use vim, but for local development, emacs + evil mode is my daily driver.

As someone who uses vim as a daily driver and emacs with evil-mode for a lisp IDE and occasional org-mode, biggest issue is every new mode you add will either use chording like emacs or will need completely new vim-compatible keybindings. It's not a lot of work, but it's enough to say "eh, I just won't use that package"

Yeah, that's totally valid. It is a pain to fit everything into the evil-mode world.

I'm really good in vim too, though. I like vim. I just wish we had nice things in vim, too. Besides, vim bindings is a square peg in a round hole. There are edge cases and community momentum to think about, all of which run against the grain when nonstandard setups are used with anything, including emacs.

As someone who has only loosely dabbled with emacs and org, is there a reason that an org equivalent couldn’t exist in vim?

I know there’s vimwiki and stuff but I mean is there a reason that the full functionality of orgmode couldn’t be ported to vim (modulo some keybindings)? Does it really on having more control over the UI than just what’s available in a terminal?

I think that full org mode wouldn't work in vim, but at a deeper level, it doesn't jive with the "zen" of vim. But I'd want a solution that did.

Here's an example. Emacs has SLIME[1], and vim has like SLIME for vim[2]. The vim counterpart leaves editing in the editor but makes it easy for vim to work with terminal emulators to create a great but simple SLIME experience. It respects the "zen" of vim. I wish there were an org mode equivalent. Will be checking out vimwiki.

1: https://common-lisp.net/project/slime/

2: https://github.com/jpalardy/vim-slime

there is this package (unmaintained but still kind of working) https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode

I tried spacemacs, but its just too unfamiliar & seems slow.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com