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Comment by hello_asdf | Hacker News Reader

As someone who has always used vim, what are the benefits of this system over a standard vim installation?

You get a computing environment which "breathes" Lisp[1] and is itself mostly built up from a fully hackable Lisp codebase.

I can highly recommend Bozhidar Batsov's Emacs Prelude[2] as a nice foundation for building a personalized configuration. Just fork it and put your personal .el files under the "personal" subdirectory; then "git fetch ... && git merge" to keep up to date with improvements committed to the author's repository.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs_Lisp

[2] https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude

I disagree re: forking it, I think there's a lot of stuff that continues to be a bit of a pain to manage, but it's a good first start.

I think my approach re: prelude is a bit cleaner. See this: https://github.com/mahmoudimus/.emacs.d

This allows an easy to back up to github while still maintaining easy update access to prelude.

You get access to things like org mode and magit and deep REPL integration and an integrated package manager. You get the ability to configure absolutely everything in elisp. Many experienced Emacsers routinely write small snippets of elisp to automate some task. This goes well beyond adding a key bindings here and there, or the odd macro, and is really amazingly powerful.

Can't you do the same thing with vimscript (or python, if you're using +python builds)?

No. This has been discussed ad nauseam already. Vimscript offers a limited API to some functionality of Vim. Emacs is written in Elisp, and thus, everything is accessible and changeable in Elisp. What is more, Emacs and Elisp were designed from the ground up with malleability in mind.

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