Hacker News Reader

Comment by CJefferson | Hacker News Reader

This kind of thing really appeals to me, I'm very tempted to give it a try.

I have tried emacs and vim a few times, but the problem is that I don't want to use them for everything, and I have trouble getting my head around two totally different ways of working. I recently did a check of the programs I use in the average week. The current list is (in no particular order)

    * XCode, for Objective-C / iOS development
    * Eclipse, for C++ / Android
    * Apple Mail
    * Chrome
    * TeXShop, for Latex editing
    * Sublime text, for other bits of C/C++
    * Vienna, for RSS reading
    * Evernote, for document ordering
    * Wunderlist, for todo lists

And what is great is that all these apps share 90% of my frequently used key-presses. In particular, I'm never at a loss as to what quit/find/open/save are. Each of these tools I have found the best at what they do.

View on HN

I think that choice of editor, where you might do 80+% of your real work, should not be dictated by similarity to other tools. I'm certainly not driven from web applications when they behave radically differently from desktop applications, which are equally different from command-line tools, not to mention curses programs.

Vim bindings are used in `less` and `more`. Emacs-style bindings are the default in bash and zsh.

You could use emacs for everything under Chrome. I don't use emacs, and probably won't because I don't feel like learning new keybindings for everything, but I hope to mess around with the org-mode clones for vim soon.

You might have something to gain by switching to Emacs. AFAIK of the 9 elements of your list at least 6 can be easily done inside emacs. I leave out web browsing (it can be done but yeah, leaves a lot to be desired imho), Android development (ADT is really really good) and maybe "document ordering", which, depending on what it exactly is, might be done with org-mode.

'document ordering' is mostly gathering and organising PDFs, web links, and snippets of text.

One of these days I might give emacs another go. Last time I had a look for 'quick start' emacs setups (about 3 months ago), the most recent ones I found seemed to be telling me to install the development version of emacs 24, which I couldn't even get to compile.

One of the really cool thing about emacs is that you can do so much in it. Everything from listening to music to browsing the web.

Unfortunately it lacks a decent text editor.

I've just been playing around with Evil-mode, an new Vim emulation mode (I've previously tried viper and vimpulse) and am finding it fairly enjoyable. I haven't pushed it really hard yet, and to be fair I could still see switching back to Vim for some things (like navigating code with ctags for example). But for things where I want to be in Emacs but hey it would be cool for this buffer to have vi key bindings, I think I like it quite well. (Enough so that I'm daydreaming about trying to contribute code to it once I understand it better).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com