Hacker News Reader

Comment by dorian-graph | Hacker News Reader

> But, getting into optimal setup in neovim/vim involves lot of configuration.

I haven't found this to be true. I've basically copied the configs from READMEs and have everything working.

I’m with the parent. I have to copy and paste all of these different little snippets (in the arcane viml language, although now maybe I can configure with kia?) and annotate what they do, and sometimes they compose poorly and other times they don’t work at all. Many plugins are only available via some of the package managers do you have to use several package managers with their own conventions.

Honestly the thing I like best about vim are the keybindings, and while many other editors try to reproduce them, they rarely get it right. The only one I’ve found that comes close enough is vs code and it doesn’t search properly (case insensitive) and it uses a sane regex language instead of whatever regex language vim uses.

I specifically dislike the vim philosophy that defaults should be insane and the user should have to configure things to their liking with all of the expertise that entails. VS code does a much better job in this regard (though it has its own quirks).

I think the vim philosophy is slightly different. The vim philosophy is if it worked yesterday, it works today. This means, for the most part but not exclusively, not making breaking changes. This means, by proxy, that the defaults were set a long time ago and are unlikely to change. It's a difference in who they consider the most important users, the ones already using it or the new users that might use it in the future.

I think those of us who have been vim users for a while can still appreciate intuitive design. :) Moreover, this could be entirely backwards compatible--you could have a single boolean "sane-defaults" flag which defaults to false (for our dear legacy users) but which new users can override.

Exactly. This lets configurations accrete over time and ultimately get to a place where you don't have to think about your changes and they "just work" for you.

I think emacs is more likely to have breaking changes, but I haven't used it a terrible amount, so I can't really say.

> I think emacs is more likely to have breaking changes

Matter of fact - stuff in Emacs breaks all the time. Frankly, Emacs simply defies any logic - sometimes you feel it shouldn't work at all, yet it does.

You see, when talking about differences of configuring Emacs and any other text editor or IDE, one has to understand - there's really no "configuration" in common sense. Emacs is a Lisp environment where you run your programs. You can download, import, and use other programs. Very often those programs "talk" to each other. Sometimes (of course), the line of communication breaks, and then you have to step in and patch them up so they can continue working together.

That's the biggest headache and confusion for beginners. They shy away from learning Emacs Lisp, and they think they can focus on learning Emacs fundamentals by using some "minimal configuration".

But only after understanding the basics of Lisp - structural editing, evaluating s-expressions, macro-expansion, etc., one could appreciate the enormous capabilities of Emacs. And when something breaks, it's quite simple to spot the problem and put a workaround.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com