Comment by _verandaguy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _verandaguy | Hacker News Reader

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The Church of Vim is always accepting new disciples.

Jokes aside, if you're considering Vi-like editors (and assuming you haven't already done your research -- which by the sounds of it, you may well have):

- I recommend going for Neovim over classic Vim at this point. The first-class Lua support for building out your configs and working with extensions is a big quality-of-life improvement over just VimL, and it's a more portable skill with fewer surprises. As a bonus, this gives you access to a world of shockingly high-quality extensions that require Lua to run.

- If you want a decent starting point before you start tweaking a ton of settings, Spacevim is it. I haven't used it extensively but I've only heard good things.

- I recommend against trying to use Emacs bindings in Vim if you can help it. I used these when I initially moved over (at this point about a decade ago) and they were clunkier than both Emacs's bindings and Vim's native bindings. Learning how to work with Vim's modes is an investment that pays off as quickly as a few days with intense use, or a few weeks with more casual use.

- `vim-arpeggio` (or the native chording support in newer versions of Neovim) is your friend for avoiding `<Esc>`-induced repetitive-strain injury.

Oh, you think people choose Emacs instead of Vim because of keybindings?

Then tell me please, how often do you do your research in Vim, using LaTeX embeddings while taking annotations to a pdf that's rendered in the adjacent window?

How often do you take notes, while watching a YouTube video while controlling the playback, speed and volume from your editor? I can watch the video, while following the transcript karaoke-style, pause, speed-up, mute the video whenever I want (so I can start typing), I can grab the pieces of transcript and ask an LLM to give me explanations, etc.

Do you read RSS in Vim? Are any RSS readers as well-integrated and feature-rich as elfeed.el in Emacs? I honestly doubt it. And it's not a matter of skepticism over the quality of Vim extensions. Emacs has far fewer active users and even fewer of those who build things in Elisp, yet it remains the most integratable thing ever. The thing is - unlike VSCode, Vim, Sublime, and IntelliJ - Emacs allows you to change any given behavior of any function - built-in or third-party - with such great granularity that is simply not possible anywhere else.

What about email? Is there anything close to the level of notmuch, mu4e or gnus? I seriously doubt any vim plugins provide the same level of integration.

Do you manage your Jira (or whatever project management) you do from Vim?

Do you control your browser from Vim? I do it from Emacs and it's very cool.

Can you perform a dynamic search on YouTube, Google, DuckDuckGo, Wikipedia, your browser history and other places while typing the query only once? I do that all the time in Emacs.

So, Emacs is not about keybindings. Because you can change them in a way that no other editor lets you do. In Emacs you can use whatever modal or non-modal editing flavor you want, but that's beyond the point.

> How often do you take notes, while watching a YouTube video while controlling the playback, speed and volume from your editor? I can watch the video, while following the transcript karaoke-style, pause, speed-up, mute the video whenever I want (so I can start typing), I can grab the pieces of transcript and ask an LLM to give me explanations, etc.

Hey, any chance you can expand on how you do this, or just share configs?

Thanks!

Of course. I use elfeed-tube and elfeed-tube-mpv, which uses mpv.el. That allows you to control mpv directly from Emacs. I have a simple transient that I use https://github.com/agzam/.doom.d/blob/main/modules/custom/we...

Thanks a bunch - I'll give it a go!

As a schismatic from the Church of Vim, I’m compelled to recommend kakoune here. Unless you’re running in a peculiar legacy platform like Windows or Amiga, the selection oriented editing and smooth Unix integration are a delight.

I've considered it from time to time. The conclusion I keep drawing is that, if I were going to benefit from a selection-oriented editing paradigm, I would use Visual mode more than I do.

The multi-cursors, those I want. But I'm willing to wait for Neovim to get them.

That’s entirely reasonable; I switched in part because I was using visual mode so much. That being said, if you want a more vi-like experience in kakoune, you can always pipe your whole buffer through sed :)

Considering the steady stream of CVE's against Vim's C code, security is the last reason to choose Vim. I've often wondered why there were so many Vim CVE's, and meanwhile never really any Emacs CVE's. My thinking has been that it's because so much of Emacs is implemented in Elisp, a memory-safe language, and much more of Vim is implemented in C.

So now there is an Emacs CVE, and it's a big one. But if you're going to jump ship for something more secure, it would be woefully misguided to go for Vim.

Any editor that goes for expressive power and flexibility is going to have security issues sooner or later. If you want safe, you'll need to cut features, pick something simple.

As another fan of Kakoune's model of editing (or model of modal editing), I would recommend Helix. It's a low-config tool that lets you start working without turning many knobs. Supports tree-sitter grammars and language server protocol.

I haven't heard of either Kakoune or Helix, but I'm buried pretty deep in my own opinionated config.

As far as I'm concerned, the more readymade options, the better. Thanks to you and sevensor for adding recommendations!

> I recommend against trying to use Emacs bindings in Vim if you can help it

This is fine, I think. Using C-w is more convenient than <Esc>diw. I also find C-a and C-e quite convenient, although you need plugins for these (tpope's vim-rsi is good).

I might be worth starting without them, though, so they learn not to rely on them too much.

That being said, I use home-row mods, which makes Control a lot easier to use than regular keyboards.

Spacevim? Emacs bindings in vim? Heresy!

Spacemacs defaults to vim bindings and it's easily my favorite editor, while saving you from (some of) the endless config tweaking.

Are you saying there can’t be security vulnerabilities in Neovim? [rhetorical question]

As I understand it, the vulnerability is that viewing untrusted elisp code may lead to arbitrary code execution. Personally, I don’t remember a case where I would view elisp code without the intent of running it.

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