From Vim to Emacs in fourteen days (2015)

>> Debian's Vim maintainer switches to Emacs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=341492 - Oct 2008 (32 comments)

He warned me I should switch from vi to emacs because prolonged vi usage causes hair loss. :)

I always keep a GVIM window open so that I can type text there and then paste those into other places that are not vi.

It also helps that vi is a lot more stable than certain websites and is less likely to lose my text. It's nice to be able to just copy&paste without having to re-type the same text when browser crashes.

Essentially, I get modality when I want an interface. And the rest of the time, I type.

I still make sure that I know good-enough vim and nano so I can do what I want outside of my own environment.

emacs has good vim emulation through the evil package.

Doom emacs, is a decent place to start for a vimmer.

I prefer vim for everything else and the general "minimalist" approach in particular. Emacs seems to appeal to people who like to do everything within one tool.

For me the main reason I prefer emacs is the key bindings are better.

Another reason that emacs (the real thing) is available everywhere. You can install it on Linux, Mac and Windows. And you can run it in console mode (terminal) as well as GUI (even on Windows).

If I were to hazard a guess: zero. That was also me during ten years of vim usage. Vim encourages the mindset of mastery = learning a bunch of tricks, remembering them and incorporating them into muscle memory.

Emacs on the other hand encourages the mindset that my editor is a programmable tool, I am a programmer, I can make it do whatever I want. You are always just one click away from the source code implementing any functionality of your editor, which you can, if you choose to do so, modify and evaluate on the fly.

> vi is available basically everywhere

Emacs-like shortcuts are also available wherever you have readline (e.g. many shells).

>This has saved my ass at least twice where I couldn't access vim or had internet access to install XYZ editor.

In those situations, I also still use vim. But 99% of the time, I am not on some remote machine, I am on my personal computer, so I can choose to use a tool that is not installed by default. The basic vim commands I have internalized over the years are sufficient for those odd jobs.

>So as a power vim user I see no reason to switch.

To each their own. Personally, I think that Emacs is a much more rewarding tool to master.

>most editors now have support for reasonable vim bindings

So does Emacs :)

In fact Emacs' vim plugin is probably has the most feature rich of all the vim emulations.

In other words it does one thing, hopefully well. The philosophy behind the original vi, and IIRC originally vim too — didn’t it previously have an explicit non-goal of adding an embedded terminal emulator? If it did, those days seem over, so you IMO you might as well use an editor that does many things well (eg. having a proper designed language as the default for configuration, not the bodge that is vimscript with Lua as just a secondary option ), if you’re going to use an IDE and not an actually minimal text editor like vis or sam.

Fortunately you don’t need to ‘re-learn everything’ with evil-mode. I doubt other editors’ support for reasonable vim bindings is as complete as the common base of Spacemacs and Doom, they certainly aren’t as complete of operating systems, capable of being your WM (EXWM) or your init system or shell (http://www.informatimago.com/linux/emacs-on-user-mode-linux....), nor capable of running in a terminal over ssh.

Sure there's all the regular Emacs value-adds (Org-mode, Magit, TRAMP etc.) and there's no rush to start learning them, but navigating local/remote codebases all the while treating Dired filesystem views, regular files AND terminal ptys as buffers with full modal editing I find to be something of a special power. This has been possible for a long time with eshell/shell etc. but vterm really takes the lag out of it IMO. This workflow was certainly my gateway drug to Emacs. It displaced nearly two decades of vim for editing and tmux for terminals. YMMV.

[1] I wrote a bit about the workflow and continuing to train better with vim bindings using Emacs https://martin.baillie.id/wrote/evil-motion-training-for-ema...

https://www.spacemacs.org/

I like org mode a lot. It has a lot of functionality that makes it useful for all sorts of things beyond plain text editing. Using evil meant I didn't need retrain for common editing operations, although certain org-mode specific functionality means learning new Emacs-style key sequences.

Other than that, I still haven't learned anything about using plain emacs, so I only use emacs for editing org files. They're a different enough entity from ordinary text files that switching editors to use org mode doesn't bother me.

You don't need to install emacs on every computer you use. The emacs on your laptop has tramp so you can edit any file on any computer you have ssh access into.

https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/47318/how-can-i-st...

(I've been cluelessly hacking at emacs for decades, and there's ALWAYS something new to learn.)

He was as of Jan 2020.

I wish someone had told Doom about it before I picked up spacemacs so maybe this post will benefit past-future-me.

Simple Make fails on linux out of the box.

And the look&feel and features are very far from emacs.

After a few weeks of fighting it, I switched to evil-mode emacs and was pretty happy since then.

So, once you learn a vi command, you can use it with all the motions you already know, and once you learn a motion, you can use it with all the commands you already know.

The other aspect, that is more insidiously useful: vi is almost everywhere, and will easily fit on an embedded system. It's a rare server that doesn't have it, either. This is definitely vi, not vim, when I say this, though.

I have been using a jetbrain IDE recently and surprisingly, the vim plugin is pretty decent. So knowing vim lets me use both the IDE and emacs with less friction.

Command mode lets you manipulate text using a full keyboard as shortcuts. Depending on setup this can reduce the amount of chording you do.

Visual mode lets you select text. By character, line, or region/block. I find this easier than emacs selection.

Insert mode what you use to enter text.

Personally, I mostly just use evil for modal editing, as I am a long time vim user. Then I use the emacs shortcuts on top of that.

Also, if you enjoy the experience provided by emacs + evil, giving a try to the native compilation branch of emacs 28 gives noticeable improvement in terms of speed.

[1] Spacemacs "it's a sophisticated and polished set-up, focused on ergonomics, mnemonics and consistency" VS being focused on speed, https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs#introduction

A couple years ago during a lull in a dev cycle I built a neovim setup to see the state of that art but I didn't stick with it.

I've rewritten my emacs configuration many times, swapped between spacemacs, vanilla, and doom. I am currently on doom emacs with my customizations.

I also do not use evil mode anymore. Default emacs bindings make a lot of sense to me. I can still use vim with muscle memory, but I reach for "mg" if I need a quick edit more often than not.

I'd like to give emacs one more chance, but haven't gotten around to it. Last time I tried Spacemacs (for about a month, sorry not a year) and ultimately didn't like it, I'm planning on trying Doom Emacs next.

I still use vim when I am at a new system or on a remote server, but Emacs is love, Emacs is home. It is the most open, discoverable and hackable software system I have ever used. Every action, button, keybinding is easily introspectable - and it takes only a few clicks to get even to the source of the functionality that you are interested in. Almost every aspect of this system is modifiable by the user, even on the fly.

The only downside is that it is so much fun to play with your emacs config that you might spend too much time doing that instead of productive work. By contrast, vimscript is so disgusting that I don't think that I ever wrote a single line of vim config that wasn't copy-pasted from somewhere.

Vim user for ten years after college with a couple of forced dips into Eclipse and other IDEs, with vi keybindings where available.

Evil emacs user for about the last ten years. Magit makes me happy. Tramp wins the "but vi is everywhere" conversation. Org-mode wins.

I won't hire someone unwilling to give emacs an honest effort. Switching back to emacs remains the best professional decision I have made.

I am glad I took time to learn vim. The editing concepts around motion keys, text blocks etc. are just so much more powerful than emacs way.

I recommend all emacs users to learn vim atleast give evil mode a try.

I have gone back and forth between vim and emacs, usually for a bunch of years each time before currently settling on emacs with Doom. With the nativecomp branch, it's actually pretty snappy and doom emacs is a great setup to get started without drowning in the amount of configuration.

I would say that I just love vim style input and modal editing, but doing that on top of emacs with evil mode and elisp is a better match for me than vimscript. The feedback loop you get with LISP and emacs is incredible when tweaking things to your liking.

Every function is accessible, there is just a global scope and you can call pretty much anything. It's sounds like an horrible idea, but it also means you can quickly hack stuff by reusing the internals of a package you like.

For example, it took me half an hour to initially POC this https://github.com/jhchabran/ivy-lsp-current-buffer-symbols by just skimming through the emacs-lsp codebase and randomly trying funcs in the repl to get an idea of what each function was doing.