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Comment by etra0 | Hacker News Reader

I remember seeing vim as a complex solution for text editing, and I didn't touched it for that same reason. A couple of years later I spent sometime learning it and now it's my day-to-day tool for writing code.

I feel the same with Emacs, I've been reading (very little) about it and I wonder if I dedicate the same time I did for learning vim I'd be in the Emacs bandwagon, but at the same time I don't feel that curious about it, because I feel happy with vim.

I've tried some versions with vim bindings but the problem remains the same, the energy to explore the rest just wasn't there.

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I was avoiding Emacs for years because I heard that it's a huge timesink, so I kept using Vim and later NeoVim. Last month I started learning Clojure(great language btw) and after some consideration I decided to give Emacs a try. It's my new favorite thing, it was a pleasure to learn. It took about 4 sessions to get productive with it, a couple of days. Really not that much of an effort. After a bit of tinkering, I feel like Emacs is what I was always looking in other IDEs. (Neo)Vim is a great text editor, but I was never able to customize it to a point where I was 100% satisfied with it. With Emacs it took a couple of weeks. If you end up giving Emacs a try, I would advise using the native keys, at least until you're comfortable with the editor. When in Rome... Also, masteringemacs.com has a great beginner article, I highly recommend it.

True, vim at the end of the day as you said -- is just a text editor. I usually use vim + tmux to handle a couple of panels with compiler + debugger. Maybe I should try Emacs since it sounds like it can do everything without ever leaving it.

One thing I remember though, startup time of emacs was a bit painful, but I could be misremembering things.

I guess tomorrow will be a fun day :^D

For me, the big feature in editors is mouseless editing. With emacs my fingers never have to leave the keyboard. When I started out in the Dark Ages, vi offered the same benefit, but multiple buffers were easier in emacs, so I ended up with emacs. I use some emacs extensions (e.g. ctags recently), but that's a secondary benefit.

So from my perspective, you've already gotten most of the benefit just with vi. YMMV. If emacs were to disappear today, I'd probably switch to vi and be perfectly happy.

Vim still has some short comings when it comes to developing, since at the end of the day, is a text-editing tools. I usually use tmux + vim over SSH and it's very comfy, maybe Emacs can do all of that in Emacs itself.

I hope I can gather enough energy some day to give it a try. I'm really not into fighting for which ecosystem is better, I just want to enjoy editing code, and so far vim is making it fun, but exploration can be fun too :D

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