After 20 years of switching back and forth I decided I wanted an extensible editor not a programming language with an editor built in. That's worked well for me.
I really always just want the simplest thing that will work as I need to rely on it entirely and understand how it works. If I was to use emacs, I'd probably use mg as shipped with OpenBSD.
Why? Emacs reports errors fine in my experience and if not it includes a debugger.
> or you have to delve into elisp
What's the problem with elisp? I guess its a matter of preference, but in my opinion elisp is easier to understand than vim script. Emacs includes extensive(!) documentation for it in it's base distribution. Granted, it's a dated language nowadays, but 3rd party libraries - easily installed through elpa - like dash.el and s.el make it a much more pleasant experience.
> or you get carpal tunnel...
Again: Why? This article is about viper-mode which emulates vims key bindings so RSI should be exactly as likely as with vim itself. You could also adapt them to your needs, of course.
I don't really want masses of extensibility but what I want is something that works out of the box, is understandable and doesn't require masses of customisation that I have to drag around with me everywhere.
On this basis using viper with Emacs is as illogical as using vsvim with visual studio. One should use vim (or vi which I'm equally happy with)
Things like vsvim or emacs for eclipse become incredibly useful when you want to keep your productive habits in these clunky IDEs.
So I was trying to make Emacs not drop its stupid temp files next to the opened file and found this piece of incomprehensible code:
(setq backup-directory-alist
`((".*" . ,temporary-file-directory)))
set backupdir=~/.vim/backups
I still haven't gotten it to work.
Meanwhile in Vim
set numberThis is actually quite nice to customize because you can change little bits of behaviour by just adding another pair (regex . string) to the list. Typing "C-h v backup-directory-alist" also explains what the list is for and lets you customize it with a gui.
I think the second part kind of misses the point, as someone in vim has already implemented the feature you wanted, the way that you wanted. So you are basically turning on a parameter.
What is much more important to ask here is how would I implement that functionality [in whichever editor] from scratch, and can I even do that?
Turn on line numbers everywhere by putting this in ~/.emacs.d/init.el:
(global-linum-mode)
linum-mode
M-x customize-group RET linum