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> There’s really nothing killer in Emacs

1. Org mode 2. Magit 3. Wdired 4. Synergy between various components (shameless plug: https://mbork.pl/2023-01-30_The_benefits_of_everything_being...)

1. Org mode - I will admit that I'm not a fan of org mode and find it to be oversold and another time waster for people who are already wasting time configuring their editors. I personally use vimwiki, there is a vim plugin for org mode.

2. Magit - Tim Pope is the pope of Vim plugins and fugitive is easily as good or better than Magit. I have never had any issue doing any sort of complex task in git or fixing conflicting using fugitive.

3. Wdired - Tim Pope again has vim-vinegar to improve netrw. Never had a problem or thought about manipulating directories inside of Vim.

4. Again, if you believe in the Unix philosophy then you have to admit that Emacs is simply bloated and trying to do too much and therefore is not really the best at anything. And more importantly, if there's something that Emacs can't do you've screwed yourself because you haven't built an environment around many distinct tools on the command line and it's going to be awkward to integrate.

> if you believe in the Unix philosophy then you have to admit that Emacs is simply bloated and trying to do too much and therefore is not really the best at anything

On the contrary, Emacs tries to do just one thing: provide an Elisp runtime for other applications. It does this fairly well.

Do not confuse Elisp applications like evil, org, calc, magit, etc. with Emacs itself!

Yep. If you see Emacs as a text editor with lots of features, then it's doing lots of things. But, if you see Emacs as a platform that comes bundled with some apps by default, then its "one thing" is to be a text-oriented app platform.

The whole "do one thing" slogan is kind of vacuous anyway; e.g., what if my "one thing" is "implement all WWW standards to be able to use any web page"? Is that still "one thing"? If not, then wouldn't implementing only "one" part of WWW be useless?

Emacs is a lisp refugee in Unixland. It does not follow the Unix philosophy, it follows the Lisp philosophy. But it integrates.

-- Source unknown (to me)

> Again, if you believe in the Unix philosophy then you have to admit that Emacs is simply bloated and trying to do too much and therefore is not really the best at anything.

If.

> I will admit that I'm not a fan of org mode and find it to be oversold and another time waster for people who are already wasting time configuring their editors. I personally use vimwiki, there is a vim plugin for org mode.

I actually use emacs solely for org-mode. I find editing single files and even larger projects to be more of a pain that it is worth, so I just use my custom vim to do that.

What keeps me with org mode and emacs is mostly bibliography management. I have emacs set up to read my Zotero directory, and with a keybinding I can insert a reference to a book or magazine or the such. Now, what is really great about this is that when I export the org file (usually to latex->pdf, but also occasionaly to HTML), it exports the references in the style that they need to be in (MLA, APA, Turabian, etc.) and creates a bibliography page at the end of the export with everything that I referenced.

I can also add notes to any references using org-roam, so that I have have annotated bibliographies quite easily.

If I could have something else that does just this, I would drop emacs in a heartbeat. But until I do find that, emacs and org-mode it is.

Same. I have try many outliners to irrationally avoid emacs but they all suck compared to org-mode.

How do you surf the web in vim?

How do you read email, RSS news, and usenet with vim?

Does vim have a chat client as powerful as ERC?

Mainly, though, is vim programmed in and extended through a lisp, and does it have an entire lisp ecosystem built around it?

Don't get me wrong, I love vim, and used it and vi for 25 years before switching to emacs. But my emacs can do far, far more than vim ever did... and there's no way I'll be switching back until it has all the above and more.

seems weird to me that one would want to do any of these things inside vim... though it should be possible with the right plugins... but why? just use a window manager like screen or tmux to multi-task.

It's because of the tight integration with the rest of the editor and all the rest of the packages that I use.

For example, when I go to edit an email I don't have to start up an external editor, so there is no context switching. Also, as emacs is super powerful, the editor that I use to edit my emails is super powerful, unlike the editors in most other mail clients.

Copying and pasting or importing/exporting between the various packages and other emacs buffers that I use is also seamless unlike anything that you do between conventional, separate applications. Everywhere that I go within emacs and everything that I do has the full power of emacs to do it with. I have macros, snippets, and elisp (to name just a few) at my fingertips.

Another advantage is that all these packages that I use (email, my git interface, RSS reader, etc) are all written in elisp and are integrated using elisp, so if you know elisp (which I do) it's easy to modify them to your liking, and have them do exactly what you want. This makes the whole experience super customizable to an extent unmatched pretty much anywhere else.

Without such integration and customizability, virtually all other software that I've used seems primitive and rigid by comparison.

So, yeah, it makes a big difference.

> seems weird to me that one would want to do any of these things inside vim... though it should be possible with the right plugins... but why? just use a window manager like screen or tmux to multi-task.

Imagine you put tons of information in vimwiki from your browser.

It's not a far stretch to wish you had a text browser inside of vim to more easily get important information into vim wiki.

At some point the browser could even begin to feel like a hindrance to curating and improving upon your higher quality vimwiki notes.

Emacs is like this, but not just for notes... for pretty much everything.

> just use a window manager like screen or tmux to multi-task.

I'm quite used to my auto-completion and snippets in emacs. As well as my clipboard history. The flexibility of isearch and how intuitive it's UX is.

If I leave emacs I never have all of those familiar things that fit like a glove. I'm in a different world with different rules that is far less malleable, understandable, and introspectable as emacs.

Hopefully that helps make sense of things a bit =)

I think this sort of defense of EMacs misses a key point: most people have no interest in running a browser, email, chat, etc. from within their text editor.

Generally people prefer to do those sorts of things with specialized applications that are more tailored towards those individual use cases.

Alas, living in emacs can't be appreciated until you get good at emacs. More than the "one-stop-shop" aspect of it, there's the "everything is a buffer of manipulable text" aspect which, again, can't be appreciated until you make the leap of faith.

> Never had a problem or thought about manipulating directories inside of Vim.

It's extremely useful though, I find myself using the fact I can treat my directory list as a text file quite often.

Also related plug, a newsletter with emacs plugins to help out with, mostly org mode and AI and emacs integration open source tepos.

https://generativereview.substack.com/p/tasks-open-source-em...

I wouldn't call Magit "killer" at this point, its basically feature competitive with other editor git integrations and that is about it

Use both heavily. Vim is fantastic for editing one off files.

Emacs on the other hand is fantastic to work on a computer for a long period of time. I do use evil mode, as I do think it's a much better way to work in a file. Project management, magit, org-mode, being able to edit functionality of the editor within couple of mins to adjust for an temporary change/or indefinitely is what keeps me coming back to emacs.

I've tried vim variations that build in project management and all I'm missing from emacs, but left it at some own written telescope functions to cover base needs.

Love for both, but to me they are not comparable.

(Maybe because I picked up emacs at the same time a good friend picked up vim, and it's been a parallel editor journey for 6+ years)

Vim has terminal support, gdb support built in. We have vim plugins maintained by the top Vim plugin specialist for git and project management. We have vimwiki, markdown, org mode support. We have fuzzy finding, autocomplete, lap support. I really don't think you can reasonably tell me you can't live in Vim, when I have had the same session open editing the linux source tree for like two months now.

>I really don't think you can reasonably tell me you can't live in Vim

Vim at the end of the day is a terminal application and when it comes to debugging objectively it does not live up to the graphical interface of a proper IDE. Emacs is only slightly better in that regard, it's a GUI application but the age shows as well.

I don't think it's an accident that a lot of vim users are obsessive print-debuggers and that's just a plain handicap coming from living in a terminal. From just observing a lot of developers work I would say not knowing how to fully utilize debuggers and the modern interfaces we have for them is the number one productivity killer.

Maybe a Vim expert can help me out. I’ve used Vim for a long time, but never with any plugins, and only a few lines in my .vimrc.

My problem is that the syntax highlighting, specifically for TypeScript is pretty bad. I have a regular expression (for parsing front matter) that seems to cause Vim’s syntax highlighting to go haywire (it stops and sometimes crashes).

Is anyone aware of a way to get more reliable syntax highlighting in Vim, ideally with a minimum of fuss?

using lsp with typescript-language-server?

most of the neovim setup scripts (lazyvim etc) get this set up automatically

An LSP seems overkill for syntax highlighting? This seems more like a treesitter thing.

(Mind you, I have no experience with TypeScript, just saying this as a general remark on what those components do.)

Oh, my initial research (reading the Neovim docs) indicated that setting up Neovim would require a lot of manual configuration for getting an LSP working. I will give it another look, thanks!

Most blog posts I found seemed to assume you already had a gigantic custom config, plug-in manager, etc. I couldn’t find a “how to set up better highlighting and/or an LSP for people who know Vim but don’t know anything about configuration” guide.

Not disputing that VIM has those things, but I am telling you that I can't live in Vim based on your plugin setup. But of course, I'm glad there are good crafted ext/plugin communities on both sides so we can all can tweak it the way we like!

Huh, my experience is the other way around. The "killer" of vim is the control scheme, and evil mode ports that over very faithfully to emacs. Then you get the best of both worlds. Why would you use vim other than in very barebones environments where you cannot access your own config?

(I also don't see how tramp is an issue -- it opens up workflows I wouldn't even have access to without it!)

Why would I want to run an emacs layer adding more latency to my work to turn Emacs in to Vim when, as I said, I can do everything in Emacs I can do in Vim.

> (I also don't see how tramp is an issue -- it opens up workflows I wouldn't even have access to without it!)

Because it will randomly freeze and it's single threaded, it's slow, and it's also not novel. Vim can also edit files over SSH, VSCode can run itself remotely.

> I can do everything in Emacs I can do in Vim

Can you immediately jump to the source code associated with any key binding, read it, debug it, modify and reload it, etc., regardless of whether it comes from the base distribution or a plug-in?

For me that’s the killer feature of emacs.

I am in the same boat. Been working a lot with C++ recently and could not get debugging working. Threw in the towel and loaded vscode in about 2 hours had everything humming along and being productive.

I'm pretty sure I did the wrong thing and started with a setup like Spacemacs where random stuff would break and wouldn't even know where to look. Thought I can't seem to loose the muscle memory of vim bindings so evil is a must. On my next round will try dooms or centaur so I learn more under the hood. I do miss magit and helm.

> some glaring issues - tramp being a major one. It’s slow and very unreliable.

Over SSH? Did you turn on ssh connection sharing in ssh config?

> ControlMaster auto

> ControlPersist yes

> ControlPath /tmp/ssh-%u-%r@%h:%p

massive speedup when you do this, otherwise it starts a new connection for every operation.

Tramp is fast for me as well, it did take some work though. I had to configure it to use my controlmaster options from my ~/.ssh/config, set tramp-verbose to 0, set remote-file-name-inhibit-locks to t, and finally set vc-handled-backends to just Git. I'm glad I spent the effort to make it fast though, because now it's pretty magical.

Yes, and it's not that it's just slow, it also freezes Emacs completely when it borks (and it does bork). I also found that none of the emacs terminals could correctly display my prompt and I ended up writing a bunch of bash conditionals to make my prompt dumber to work in Emacs. Just worked out of the box with Vim's :term.

A common thing people run into with Emacs is using the "shell" under the impression that it's a terminal emulator. You want "term" for a proper terminal emulator that can handle fancy terminal stuff. The "term" terminal emulator can even run TUI stuff like nano, and even vim itself!

Are you using tramp on a LAN or halfway round the world with 200ms latency and poor bandwidth?

The strength of Emacs lies in customizing it to the user's needs. A clean installation of Emacs is not representative of what Emacs can be, but the various modern configuration frameworks such as Spacemacs and Doom Emacs offer a window into their creators' visions of what Emacs can be. And from there, it's easy to slowly transform their vision into your own.

These frameworks offer good defaults that lean towards having lots of features packed in, but it's easy to take away everything you don't want. Both Spacemacs and Doom Emacs can be stripped to almost nothing, leaving you with just a standard for organizing your custom configuration.

The tell in your message (and those in general from vim users), is insisting on treating Emacs as an editor, and comparing it primarily on that benchmark.

There are no shortage of Emacs lovers and users who will accept that vim is a better editor. You didn't need to try Emacs to gain that appreciation.

The other tell (common on HN, which has a clear selection bias), is comparing Emacs to an IDE like VS Code. Many, if not the majority, of Emacs users are not primarily using Emacs for coding.

> Vim is much more in line with the Unix philosophy.

Neither follows the Unix philosophy well. And as many people have pointed out, most of the Unix utilities are poor at following it well.[1] The amusing thing about the Unix philosophy is that when you stay within Emacs, the Emacs environment is a much better exemplar of the Unix philosophy than Unix and its tools are. It is a lot easier to compose functionalities in different Emacs packages than it is in UNIX.

I was using a Mastodon client for Emacs and wanted to render LaTeX formulae into rendered equations. I'm an average elisp coder and I got this working in under an hour by composing different Emacs packages.

There are various ChatGPT clients out there. I wanted to integrate it with my Emacs email client (notmuch). It's not a lot of work. I doubt one could integrate things into mutt as quickly/easily.

When reading an email in Mutt, how easy is it to quickly do a Web/network query on a selected text, perform analysis on the result, and display the outcome within Mutt? The analogue is fairly easy in Emacs, despite the mail tool(s) there not having any functionality to do this.

As for Mutt in general: I used it for about a decade. While it has a soft spot in my heart, there is a reason I switched to an Emacs client - before I knew anything about customizing Emacs with elisp. There were lots of gaps in Mutt that other clients out there filled. I miss nothing from Mutt, other than the color scheme.

In many of these cases, there are simply no quick, viable solutions outside of Emacs. People spend a lot of time doing these things in Emacs because it enables them to do more than they could otherwise. Imagine someone who doesn't know any programming complaining about someone else who does. To them they just see a person "wasting" all their time on another "tool".

[1] An example: https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2012/05/25/unix-doesnt-follow...

I've had the same visceral reaction when dealing with grep and find. Overly complex and bloated (albeit extremely useful).

Agree. Except vim cannot be better editor as emacs can be better vim if one likes

"Emacs has three versions of every plugin and they’re all usually not as good as the thin vim wrapper around fzf etc"

This is a bold claim. Not that fzf isn't good, but I'd like to hear about some specific ways in which fzf is better.

Vim is pretty much the best of both worlds: the ease of use of vi combined with the small footprint of Emacs!