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Comment by Tor3 | Hacker News Reader

"I know a lot of vi people use vi “because it is always there”, but is that really a good reason?"

Well.. it is always there. If I were on my own machine all the time.. but there are many machines. As an Emacs user (for decades) I still use 'vi' for config files etc. I never bothered to learn more about vi commands than necessary for that (insert, delete, append from end of line, and esc-:wq etc).

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I also use vi for config files or for quick edits when I ssh to a server or even on my machine, when I pass by a directory and I know I'll just add a line or two to a README. No need to run emacsclient for that, even with my alias ec.

Furthermore it's easy to sudo vi file, no idea how to do it with emacs. And even if I knew, I think it's a good idea to contain an edit to a protected file into a short lived process.

You can do it with TRAMP in emacs.

/sudo::/path/to/file

Learning this finally killed off my intermittent vim usage.

Once I adopted doom emacs, I found that I started using vi much more situationally; I dropped (my beloved) YouCompleteMe and the other heavier plugins from my configuration, using it as a much more bare-bones and general-purpose editor, like a bicycle for little alleys where the doom tank won't fit or if it is broken. Also, of course, while SSHed (or kubectl exect -it {pod} bash) into remote servers, because I don't know how to set up tramp.

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