After more than 25 years of Vim, in the last month I've completely switched to Emacs. And it feels like a super power... I'll be using it for the next 25 years and beyond!
I used to be a “competent” vi user, laughing at the Emacs vs vi jokes, until I realized I didn’t really know Emacs. I gave myself a 4-week challenge where I’d use nothing but Emacs, for the challenge, and to learn. Fast forward 5-6 years later, still an Emacs user, I wondered if I could understand vi as well as I’d come to know Emacs. I gave myself a challenge, …
Have since done the same w ex(1), but I didn’t let it stick for many years as a daily-driver.
I’d recommend the challenge to anybody. I did the transition doing “production work”, so it’s possible - you may not have to “wait for the right time.”
Enjoy your editing in good health.
How sweet it is to completely reconfigure the environment without losing magit and org-mode.
Also: esthetics. Modern neovim with telescope is imo just more pleasant to look at. (I was using doom emacs in the past). There are nano themes from rougier for emacs however, never gave them a try.
What would you say are the main things that you like about Emacs over Vim?
Vim is a text editor, whereas Emacs really is by definition just an Elisp runtime. Every time you type, you're calling the Elisp functions that are bound to those keys - this makes customisation simple - don't like it, you're free to change it to call different Elisp funcions.
And once you get the hang of it, it's so simple to make bindings to do ANYTHING you want (i.e your key bindings just do whatever you want them to do!).
So, out of the box, Emacs is a nice editor and some people have made default bindings... then you customise Emacs to be YOUR Emacs. In other words, Emacs is just a library for text editing and other utilities and you put them all together to make your own editor. Thinking this way, Emacs really isn't an editor at all, it's really a framework to create your own editor!