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Lisp support in vim

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21 pointskul_7 comments

I recently (about 6 months ago, I think) switched from Vim to Emacs + Evil (a really good Vim emulator) and the switch can only be described as awesome:

I feel (and this may be just me) that Lisp in Emacs is easier to learn, better integrated, and offers more flexibility than VimScript in Vim. Thus, while my whole of custom VimScript over 5 years of usage can be reduced to around 20 lines in my vimrc, I've already written several small scripts, plugins, and more in emacs lisp since I started using emacs.

Also, the plugin / extension ecosystem is fantastic, the editor has a lot of great features, and almost every customization I could think of was easily (or sometimes not so easily done).

All the while, I kept using the deeply-in-muscle-memory-ingrained Vim normal mode syntax and I use and act in Emacs just like I would in Vim. There're very very few differences. (In fact, I regularly fire up vim for quick config file editing, and there's no getting used to it because it really feels the same, only looks different and has less functionality, something which I don't need when I'm quickly changing a couple of lines in a config file).

If you like Vim but are wishing for a better integration language and possible more IDE like features, give Emacs + Evil a try:

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil

I gave it 21 days. Evil is by far the best vim emulator I have ever used. Seriously, nothing else comes close. It is also fairly trivial to fix the rough edges via the init.el.

> Lisp in Emacs is easier to learn

Agreed, not so much because the baseline is simpler, but because it is consistent -- everything is a function call -- and once you get over the hump, this is a huge benefit. Vimscript has gobs of gotchas.

> Also, the plugin / extension ecosystem is fantastic

Can't agree here. The plugins are often hard / annoying to use and missing critical features. I still think (despite vimscript) that the vim plugins are far better in most cases. Decent fuzzy finding across everything I care about (files, tags, buffers, etc) is a rather robust example of where emacs falls down... I tried literally dozens of extensions.. to get basically a "meh" solution.

At the end of the day, after using Evil 10 hours a day for 3 weeks -- I came the the conclusion that it is very good and very usable... some rough edges when you break out of evil mode, annoying console support (you need sr-speedbar, not speedbar), and annoying color schemes.

It did make me focus my vim workflow a little more with tools like vimux (works with tmux), expandregion, easymotion and a few other tricks that I learned to love from emacs.

Vim-fireplace with Clojure is really awesome. Check it out [1]. It's written by Tim Pope, who is a very active developer of Vim related tooling. The setup is simpler than Emacs, and works out of the box (cider for Emacs gave me endless headaches [2]).

I recommend it highly because it shortens your code-run-feedback cycle dramatically.

[1] https://github.com/tpope/vim-fireplace [2] https://github.com/clojure-emacs/cider/issues

I'm interested in creating my own scheme interpreter and I've used /n?(vi)|m?|(e(x|d))/ for many years. For any external script the end user can stream back the transform simply by using the bang operator. How would I go about calling one of my scripts in vimscript so I could create named macros without the bang operator? Is there a library function which I can create a small system wrapper to call any language on the system to extend it without bang?

Vim gets threading support via LISP before Emacs does - good for you guys.

(I'm a LISP + EMACS user who desperately needs threads in EMACS)

...or you could use Emacs viper-mode and get lisp support in vim in lisp.

Yo dawg, I heard you like Lisp so we...

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