So my question: How does Emacs and Vim compare speed-wise? I come from a Sublime Text background and really miss the ability to quickly navigate between tabs (buffers in vim), and sometimes it takes a full second.
I hear this a lot, and I'm not debating whether it's true or not since ymmv. I'm curious if anyone here has gone the other way.
I used vi in my teens then switched to emacs, which I used for over a decade. A couple years ago I switched to JetBrains IDEs and have never been happier. I hadn't used an IDE since Borland Turbo C, and forgot what I was missing.
Are there any other former vi/emacs users (like, hardcore - I used to browse the web in emacs) who ditched it for an IDE?
I found that the mouse really wasn't a productivity killer for the few times you need to use it in a modern IDE.
I've used both emacs and vim extensively, but have never "ditched" either for an IDE. However, what I have found is that in some dev environments I'll use the IDE as the primary editor. IDEs at their best have great tools for maintenance, navigation, and comprehension of existing codebases. But when it comes time for e.g. many kinds of textual heavy lifting or whole-cloth new code I'll switch right over to emacs/vim.
FWIW, I'm really hoping that the long-term architectural changes in neovim will open the door to first-class IDE style feature sets. There's definitely been some good work that way in recent years, but those efforts are often hobbled by the classic editors' long legacies.
I imagine there are some plugins available for vi and emacs that try to provide these features, but I would guess they require some configuration and won't work as reliably.
C++ has always been had issues but for me it's good enough especially since I move between languages and OSes a lot. If I was just doing C# on Windows I would probably use an IDE tuned for it.
When I was working at a .net shop, VS became my vim (mostly because it was already always running), also because it was incredibly familiar.
Since leaving the .net world though, I've relapsed. Have had trouble with eclipse|intelli-j|etc due to their general java slugishness on the mac.
http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Vim-Thought-Pragmatic-Progra...
A whole book of tips
I'll only use an IDE for languages that rely heavily on code completion, and have good support for it through static typing and libraries that include symbol tables. In practice, that means Java and C#.
In those cases, I prefer IDEs with some kind of Vim emulation over Emacs.
Other environments are less restrictive, and projects often come down to just a bunch of files in a git repo. This is where text editors shine. I consider this a language feature of sorts.
I'm an active vimmer very involved with the community and, for me, using an IDE or Vim is not a political/religious/philosophical choice: it is a pragmatic choice. When I need IDE features I use an IDE, when I don't I use my favorite text editor. Simple.
> I found that the mouse really wasn't a productivity killer for the few times you need to use it in a modern IDE.
"Modern" IDEs expose all their functionalities via keyboard shortcuts so you don't really need the mouse.
Whenever I have to use Visual Studio, the VsVim extension gives me the best of both worlds.
Yes!
I also started my IDE days back in Turbo Pascal. Used most of the Turbo Pascal, C and C++ versions of Borland products up to Delphi early versions.
Thanks to some friends I also knew from seeing, not really used them, a few Amiga IDEs like DevPac.
When I started using UNIX, initially Xenix followed bz DG/UX and many others, vi was all there was available to us.
Eventually I found Emacs and it became my UNIX editor between 1996 and 2005. With vi playing the fireman role when nothing else was installed.
However UNIX wasn't the only system were I had to work on. So I became acquainted with Smalltalk and Oberon environments as well.
In the end, I kept always looking to replicate IDE experiences on UNIX systems. But never found one at the same level of experience than what the PC world had to offer me.
As my work became more focused in JVM and .NET land, I left Emacs.
Emacs might have been a great editor back in the day, but IDEs have so much to offer. Even if one can spend weeks coding ELisp code for the said functionalists they aren't as well polished nor as functional as what IDEs offer out of the box.
> I found that the mouse really wasn't a productivity killer for the few times you need to use it in a modern IDE.
If one masters IDE shortcuts + mouse, I feel productivity is like playing a FPS against someone just using the keyboard.
I don't regret buying it, but after some time I realised that it's impossible to replace Emacs completely with PyCharm.
PyCharm's support for refactoring and code transformations is very good. It's fast and easy and it makes some kinds of source code edits much more efficient than what you can do even in Vim and Emacs. Its debugger, including remote debugger is very good, too. Visualising project and file structure in a sidebar is much, much better than what Speedbar and ECB (at least for Python - I heard they work very well for other languages) can do. Codebase navigation is nice (go to symbol, etc.), although Emacs with all its tools like jedi, ag, e/ctags, occur, imenu and so on is not that much worse here.
PyCharm is very good for working with code. However, it lacks so many text editing features, that it's just too painful for me to use it exclusively. Even with many plugins installed and multiple cursors feature provided (recently - how could it take them so long to implement it?) text editing experience in PyCharm is much worse than it is in Emacs (or Vim, for that matter). And, unfortunately, working with source code is in large part the same as working with plain text.
An then there's a problem with extending PyCharm. The need to write Java code to extend an editor seems like a really bad joke. There are plugins, which let you script PyCharm with Groovy or Clojure, which I installed, only to discover that the Clojure syntax highlighting plugin for PyCharm doesn't work right now. Discovering the relevant APIs to call from a script was a major pain, too, compared to Emacs built-in combo of info manuals and help system with apropos and many reflective commands like describe-*. This is a problem, because using Emacs made my tolerance for putting up with broken/inconvenient behaviours disappear - many things I know I should be able to achieve in two keypresses in PyCharm take 3 or 4. That's not a big difference and I realize it! Yet after working with Emacs and writing ~5k loc of Elisp to scratch almost all my daily itches I just can't force myself to just ignore it and get used to this itching again, even if it's minor.
My solution was to create a quick keyboard shortcut in PyCharm which calls emacsclient with current file, placing the cursor in a current line. Surprisingly, it works very well. Launching a new Emacs frame takes almost no time at all, and when I close the frame after editing, PyCharm immediately displays updated content.
Launch macvim as `mvim -u NONE --noplugin` and see if you can still reproduce your speed issues. If you can't, then your problem is not with vim, but with a plugin (or with your ~/.vimrc).
You can use bisectly[1] to do a binary search over your installed plugins looking for a faulty one. This is similar to how git-bisect works, and it's WAY more effective than disabling your plugins one by one. I've personally used repeatedly it to narrow down problems to vim-gitgutter, which is quite possibly the buggiest plugin I've ever used.
run :profile start filename, then :profile func * Then do the slow thing, and close vim. This will write your profile data to filename.
When switching via ctrlp everything is instantaneous, but that requires more commands than just C-k or C-j.
Normally vim is very snappy for me. Perhaps you have a ton of plugins that are clogging up your installation? Or perhaps just one very badly behaved plugin?
I wonder if the redraw issues were the fault of your terminal emulator rather than vim. I don't have a lot of MacOS experience, though.
I also use Janus https://github.com/carlhuda/janus so i might be a victim of improvements made by them.
Speed is the #1 reason I switched to Vim
That disables all initializations from your .vimrc, plugins, etc. so you can see how fast "vanilla" vim is.