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Comment by erikb | Hacker News Reader

I always have a hard time figuring out why people would switch from one tool to another just to start configuring the other to behave like the original tool. Can someone name some reasons to switch from vim to a vim-like configured Emacs?

The reason I've seen mentioned by the author is to learn the other tool, in this case Emacs. But for that I think the smarter way would be to learn to use Emacs like Emacs users do it. There's a reason why things are implemented differently, right?

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> Can someone name some reasons to switch from vim to a vim-like configured Emacs?

You're attached to modal editing but you want some of the Emacs plugins and a less terrible scripting language.

Emacs isn't superior to Vim in every possible way. I personally find Vim's modal editing hard to let go of. On the other hand, vimscript is an atrocity compared to Elisp. Vimmers have certainly managed to make some amazing extensions to the editor despite that fact, but no tool is perfect; the whole point of an extension layer is to make the tool work the way you want. The defaults aren't necessarily what everyone likes (or ought to like).

This may change with Neovim, though, since add-ons will, as far as I understand, exist separately and do IPC through JSON.

But you can get Vim's modal editing with Emacs'evil-mode.

Emacs is easier to customize. I used vim for 10 years before switching last year to emacs + evil. After a month I felt more comfortable in elisp than I ever was in vimscript. If you use terminals within emacs you can navigate and search through all the text as if it were in a vim buffer, imo a step above readline's vim mode. If you are comfortable with vim modal editing you must try emacs with evil, you get much bang for your "buck". I would also argue that even though you are using vim bindings with evil doing so is actually how emacs users would do it. I say that because the emacs way seems to be to customize it until you are comfortable.

Sounds like a very good argument. Customization would be the Emacs way. That at least sounds like the Editor Operating System association to Emacs.

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