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Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like they're not even aware that it was an option.

Many people don't realize that emacs' default keybindings can be changed to be modal in exactly the same as vim, by using evil.

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Sorry for the naive question, but if you're changing all your bindings to vim, then why use emacs at all? Is there any extra functional difference?

Emacs is more like an ecosystem around text, so switching keybinding does not matter much. And most people's system is installed on a single computer, very much like Photoshop or Visual Studio. Vim is all about editing text and the keybinding are like a DSL for this purpose, so changing things will make you awkward everywhere.

The clue lies in the fact that you can customize the editing experience to function like Vim. Because that’s one out of a thousand different ways you can customize that app to function like a one-off editor, a Git client, an email reader, and so on.

There's a ton more to both editors than just keybindings.

See this post[1] where I talk about some of the things I've done with emacs -- none of which have anything to do with bindings.

You can do millions of other things too, as I'm not using emacs nearly to its full capacity. Same with vim.

Bindings in editors are like symbols in math. Yes, they're necessary, and you can do a lot with them, but symbols are not nearly all there is to math.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35560107

Vi is like an standard for moving around and editing text files. I use Vi-style commands in all my editors: Emacs, IntelliJ, and VSCode. For me, any application that supports Vi keybindings and has some sort of command palette will feel like home.

Regarding why edit files in Emacs instead of vim: I simply work on Emacs. I don't use a CLI or a file manager to navigate to my files, I already have projects set up in Emacs and can quickly open files in any such projects. Emacs also holds my note taking system. And when I'm dealing with git, nothing comes close to magit. Also, I've been using the Spacemacs framework for years, which makes it really easy to create such a customized and efficient configuration without much hassle.

The reason people like emacs has nothing to do with the default key bindings, which are basically arbitrary. Emacs is a framework and programming environment for building custom IDEs.

You get the vi bindings and modal behaviour which I find better _plus_ all emacs functions and most of the emacs bindings. I’m often mixing the 2 modes while editing.

> they're not even aware that it was an option

Actually in this case I was - but my goal was to use "vanilla" emacs just like I use "vanilla" vi(m). After all, if I'm using vi key bindings... why not just use vi?

The pure text editing is just a tiny detail. I exclusively use vim keybindings inside Emacs, as many others do.

Emacs makes extending the editor a breeze. As a new user this just means that you have packages (like VS 'extensions' or IntelliJ 'plugins') for, well, everything. For a more advanced user it means you can automate away many things that are a pain in the ass to repeatedly do in your daily work.

I'd suggest you try Doom Emacs when you have a couple of free hours to get a taste of what a properly configured Emacs can do. And, once you are on it, just press "SPC f p", select 'init.el' and check what popular packages you can activate just by uncommenting a line and doing a 'doom sync'. Then press "SPC f p" and select 'config.el' to check how even "configuration" in Emacs is just elisp code. You are just running a piece of code you can edit and even debug from itself _while_ you are running it (although that'd require a bit more explanation of how it's done) . This should give you a taste of what Emacs is about.

Both vanilla emacs and vanilla vim are only a tiny fraction as powerful as either editor enhanced with plugins. You really missed out with this choice.

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