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Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

> If, like me, you’re curious enough to give Emacs a try...

So curiosity rather than conversion. Six year later is he still using Emacs? Went back to Vim? Moved on to something else?

I have enough years invested in muscle memory of Vim itself and various plugins that what curiosity I have about Emacs is well controlled. I doubt I have runway left to get to the same productivity in another editor.

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Well the author used Evil mode which is vi emulation for emacs and quite popular. Their last post that was obviously about emacs was late 2019 but they don’t blog much. So I’d guess they still use emacs

An interesting path is to go from regular emacs to emacs with vim bindings, which is what I did, also in around 14 days. Its painful, but good for you brain. And you get the best of both worlds, or so I like to think.

I tried that too for a bit over two weeks. In the end I had a comfortable configuration, but with noticably worse performance and a lot of inconsistencies. Whenever I use Emacs I kind of like the concept but at the same time feel like the good parts are buried beneath countless random additions that should have been optional plugins. I dare to claim that >95% of Emacs users do not use its integrated Tetris implementation, for example.

You might be right, though I do not have a good reference to compare Emacs + evil with. I think by default Emacs is a somewhat mediocre editor, the one thing that saves it is the unparalleled customizability, which should allow you to slowly prune the randomness and inconsistencies. But it is a commitment, not everybody wants a relationship with their editor. Btw, I regularly play Tetris in emacs ;-)

Definitely. But the thing is, coming from Vim with a custom configuration I'm at a point where I'd first need to reverse engineer parts of Emacs and reconfigure a ton just to get back to where I left Vim. And if I learned something when trying it out then it's the futility of trying to cram Vim into it expecting it to work without a Frankenstein's monster vibe. There's always something off or incomplete. I don't think I'll try it again soon, but if I do it would be with something like God mode; for one because Evil mode somehow breaks Emacs when run in the terminal, and also because Vim and Emacs just don't mesh together well imho. They are both excellent at doing very similar things, but their approaches are just not compatible.

This is a great point. Personally, the only reason I would want to switch to Emacs is Org mode but the muscle memory for custom Vim and Tmux keymaps is hard to give up.

emacs is very customizable.

I had the same fear before switching to emacs(in evil mode), so I changed some of the default shortcuts that I was accustomed in vim(e.g. nerdtree/treemacs). It's not that hard.

The whole enormous productivity boost that you get from Org mode(and org babel/literate programming) is well worth the temporary minor inconveniences of learning the tool.

FWIW, I use emacs(with evil) inside tmux, so you can keep your flow if you are willing to invest in the transition.

magit is the best git porcelain (interface) that I’ve ever seen. I’m a longtime emacs user, but even if I wasn’t, I’d provably use magit as my git interface

> So curiosity rather than conversion. Six year later is he still using Emacs? Went back to Vim? Moved on to something else?

He was as of Jan 2020.

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