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Comment by aiscott | Hacker News Reader

I want to use emacs. I really do, mainly because of its lisp integration. Partly because I don't like being "locked" into vim. This article does make me want to give it a shot again.

But it is so painful to try to switch. It's a heavy cognitive load to do even simple things like navigation. The best way I can explain what it is like is to reference the frustration of trying to switch from QWERTY to Dvorak.

It is incredibly frustrating to go from 60 WPM to 10 WPM. It burns so much brain energy on such a critical and fundamental task. There may be a great payout if you are successful, but it's a big hurdle to get over.

There are some things that emacs does better than vim can, that I do want to switch. I'm just starting to doubt my reserves are sufficient for that task and doing other productive work at the same time.

Edit: completing some thoughts

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I won't lie, it's a painful first few days. It feels slow because you have to look up every little thing you want to do and mentally translate what you want to happen into these new strange keystrokes. Really, it's all about your frame of mind. If you go expecting to hit the ground running you're going to be frustrated. But if you come from the place where you know you're going to go slow and you're just going to do it anyway for a couple/few weeks then you'll have a much better time.

One thing I think is important is to not overwhelm yourself. You'll want to do all these cool things but you'll never remember the nifty commands if you don't even know the basic ones. Just use it for a week or two with just basic cursor movement, cut/copy/paste, saving and quitting. It'll feel like "nano" but with worse keys. Maybe learn isearch after couple days, and query-replace after a week or so. Seriously, don't even think about "buffers" for the first couple weeks. Emacs has so many features and editing commands that you're guaranteed to get overwhelmed if you try to take everything in all at once.

It also really helps to be in close proximity to someone who uses emacs so that you can ask questions as they arise.

> But it is so painful to try to switch. It's a heavy cognitive load to do even simple things like navigation.

You might be interested in viper mode [1], or another one of the VI emulation modes for emacs.

[1] http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ViperMode

Yes, I have tried viper mode, and it's a good effort. But it can only handle the basics, or at least when I tried it was just the basics. I have a ton of vim scripts customizing vim, adding features, etc., that just don't work with viper mode.

Part of me thinks that if I go over to emacs, I ought to go with the 'native' experience of it.

I appreciate the reply; and others may find Viper mode very useful.

vimpulse is an extension to viper and gives you (for example) visual mode (copy blocks using 'v').

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Vimpulse

I guess it depends how you define slow. I've never been big on VIM but have used it a number of times. My biggest complaint with it is going in and out of insert mode. With emacs, as long as you keep learning more and more about it, all the shortcuts become muscle memory and you can whip through things pretty fast.

In my experience, the extensibility of emacs was why I kept using it. I don't really notice any "slowness" compared with VIM. It's not enough to make me go to VIM anyway. But either way, to each their own. It's probably best just to know one really well and know the basics of the other. I've never been big on the whole debate. They each have their pitfalls and benefits

The trick is to start with a few basic ones then learn more as you go along.

Know how to quit (C-x,C-c) & save (C-x,C-s).

Then basic moving commands: C-p (up), C-n (down), C-b (left), C-f (right), C-a (start of line), C-e (end of line)

I used just those for quite a long while before I learned others, and even with just those command I realized how much faster I was working, as it saved time from having to move my hand to the arrow keys.

If thats all it took to improve your productivity, you can't have been very proficient with whatever it was you were using before.

Huh? How did you deduce that?

Suppose I was punching holes in cardboard cards and feeding them to a card reader. How does the fact that emacs improved my productivity reflect how proficiently I was punching those holes?

Well changing to another editor, just for the looks of it. Looks like a very bad idea. Editors are productivity tools, not religions that if you don't use one you will end up going to hell.

Learning is good. But if you are using vim and you are productive enough then building on top of it will help you more than learning Emacs from the scratch.

I've been using Emacs with Evil for a few weeks. It's really good, possibly the best vim-mode I've seen.

Here's the other vi emulation mode: http://gitorious.org/evil/pages/Home

It even has its own port of surround.vim: https://github.com/timcharper/evil-surround

That looks interesting. I hadn't heard of it before, I think I will give it a try. Thanks for the link.

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