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Comment by TheFreim | Hacker News Reader

What does this offer that evil-mode emacs, or even vscode, has to offer...?

If every text editor has to implement full emacs functionality, every alternate text editor project should just stop now.

Having something to offer != implementing every single feature of emacs. Sometimes NOT having all the stuff emacs has can be a good decision.

evil-mode emacs isn't as snappy, vscode is harder to wrangle for a really pure-like vim setup. Someone else in this thread mentioned nvim, and while I like nvim a lot, i like the vscode extension ecosystem also prefer a gui vim editor (ive tried many).

long story short, i really like the product roadmap for onivim2, even though it isn't quite feature-full/polished enough to make as my daily driver. i've been a monthly Patreon supporter since last fall, though, and am guessing it'll be my main editor sometime this year!

This perhaps used to be true if evil-mode was around in the 90s. I've used to use vim and eventually made the switch to emacs about 10 years ago, initially using viper and then becoming an early adopter of evil-mode - and it never felt less snappy than native vim, except for rare occasions when executing complex macros to do things that can't be achieved using regular expression. And the new native compilation makes any perceivable performance difference even more unlikely.

I asked what it has to offer which is different than asking "does it do exactly what emacs can do". I am never going to find a more powerful editor than emacs, at least not for a while, but that doesn't mean other editors don't have anything to offer. I still prefer intellij idea when doing Java. VS Code is a lot quicker at certain things than emacs and certain IDE features don't stop working after running it for a while (happens with my emacs setup), among other things. I also use vim for editing things when I'm already in the terminal because of its advantages in that realm.

Snappyness is definitely something emacs lacks. Usually it doesn't bother me, but sometimes I know what I want to do and it gets in the way. I'm definitely. Interested in onivim2, I'll probably compile at some point and check it out.

For me, my Emacs runs fine up till I try using lsp for java development and then it's a bloody nightmare. Currently, I'm being forced to resort to the indignity that is Eclipse as a result of that.

I'm frankly ready for a total reimagining of Emacs even if it means that extension support might be compromised for a while. The last time there was a major divide, we had XEmacs and a lot of the massive improvements that made eventually made it to mainline Emacs so it could only be a good thing for this project long term.

I've had good luck with meghanada mode for Java development but I still stick with idea most of the time (mainly because I haven't set up binds to build or do things automatically yet). Still, I have issues with emacs as an IDE sometimes. For example when doing python, I forget the backend I'm using right now, after having it running for a while a ton of processes start to get spun up and it stops being able to properly do code completions. I'm sure I could solve these problems, I just haven't yet since I usually restart emacs often anyways.

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