Ask HN: Do Emacs users feel as stuck without Emacs, as Vim users do with Vim? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do Emacs users feel as stuck without Emacs, as Vim users do with Vim?

3 pointsdrekipus4 comments

I'm sure plenty of vim users know the feeling of writing in text boxes on the web, or in other programs, and finding `:w` and `jk` everywhere, and not having modal operations.

Do emacs users have the same issue? I know a lot of software comes with some keyboard shortcuts that are similar to emacs, but not all of them, and i don't know if there's a similar level of "i am stuck without my editor" feeling that emacs users get when they don't have all the shortcuts available.

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Not a matter of keyboard shortcuts, but I'm quite at sixes and sevens in other editors because I can tell Emacs what I want done and how, live as I edit, in Lisp, and I simply cannot do that in Sublime Text or Visual Studio Code.

For me, web forms are okay for up to a typical Hackernews comment's worth of text. More than that and it gets irritating.

Being non-model, Emacs users probably have less dissonance when using text boxes, etc.

And part of the appeal of macOS for me is that the UI toolkit uses an Emacs-compatible set of shortcuts. So it's generally not a terrible experience, although without the meta key, you don't get a lot.

In day-to-day textbox use, I miss: M-f/M-b/M-d/C-delete (word forward, word back, delete word forward, delete word back), and C-space/C-w/C-y (mark, cut, paste). I usually type them, realize they haven't worked, and shift over to the fallback strategy without too much annoyance.

Strangely C-t (transpose) is the thing I miss most.

Sure, but there are things you can do to improve this. Browserplugins and others. See for instance:

https://github.com/zachcurry/emacs-anywhere https://github.com/cknadler/vim-anywhere

Emacs has allowed making use of OS-shortcuts for basic editing for a while, so I suspect people are not as frustrated as (possibly) vim users.

I still hate to be found in non-Emacs editor for any non-trivial amount of text editing (a few paragraphs), especially if it's some sort of structured text.

Note that there are browser plugins to have textareas filled in with your actual $EDITOR of choice.

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