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Comment by dumpsterdiver | Hacker News Reader

I feel like I should be the kind of person who prefers eMacs over vi(m), because I've always been a hotkey maniac. I'm actually not though at all, and I much prefer the simplicity of vim. I already have way too many hotkeys lingering in my brain, especially since I played the game Age of Empires II.

I don't play many games these days, and I certainly don't use their hotkeys (I play exclusively on consoles these days, lazily).

None of this likely has anything to do with the article. I'm sorry to report that I did not read it. I come here for the commentary, not the article. I am guilty of that.

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I've had several people recommend me their IDEs or some new text editor from time to time by telling me that the editor supports Emacs style keybindings assuming that is the main difference between editors. I've never used emac's native keybindings, nor do I use vim's since I don't use qwerty.

While my custom keybindings are something I would not want to give up they can be replicated in any other editor that provides this basic functionality. What cannot be replicated is the whole reason why I prefer emacs, I like being able to use it like a file explorer, like a terminal, I like being able to open or edit pretty much any type of file I ever use. When you combine the ability to work/view most of the files with consistent keybindings, that is the killer feature that emacs provides, its never been about the keybindings.

I'm curious though, I never really got into vim as soon I realized that it only makes sense if your layout is qwerty. Is vim just its keybindings? or is it like emacs in that the keybindings are not the main reason people use it?.

Oh goodness, I would never use vim as an IDE, or any purely text based editor. I pay out-of-pocket to use proprietary IDE's, and I consider it a cost of doing business. Vim to me, is simply a way to make minor changes to configuration files mostly. I would never dream of coding in vim.

Edit: TLDR - vim is sometimes better than sed for making changes to files, but in my mind that's about it.

I used vim for a long time and now use Emacs doom/evil over top for most of my daily work. I’d say the part of the key bindings that I find hard to live without is the modal editing side of it which helps me really think about the macros I use when moving around or editing.

The other thing I really love is the integration with the old ed editor so you can quickly do several really flexible edits with regex and get what you want. I’m sure emac’s built in functionality can do some/most of the stuff but it’s no where near as concise and other editors have no such built in functionality to speak of.

> people recommend me their IDEs or some new text editor from time to time by telling me that the editor supports Emacs style keybindings assuming that is the main difference between editors

I get that too but with Vim. People think Vim is just about the controls because all they know about Vim is the :q joke. No, that IDE's Vim plugin doesn't cut it, because unfortunately it comes with an IDE and its distracting overloaded UI, weird tab switching behaviour, absolutely infuriating popups and other annoyances.

Vim being just a really flexible and fast editor with a mostly empty status line as the entire user interface is a feature.

Stick with what you like, if it works for you then that's what's most important. Personally I switched from neovim to emacs, but I don't care for the 'emacs style' of keybindings. Instead I use evil-mode and set my own bindings with hydra for everything else. Tbh main reason I switched was elisp envy; there's not really a whole lot that you can do with one but not the other.

The neat thing about emacs is that you can make it behave like vim but with easier/more customizability.

Most of the newer Vim distribution are all offshoots of Spacemacs/Spacevim. You can see it clearly in the choices of mnemonic key bindings.

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