What I Like About vim | Hacker News Reader

What I Like About vim

patmaddox.com

23 pointstessro11 comments

The thing I like most about Vim is that I'm not forced to configure it.

Emacs has modalities too, but you can't bail out of them by hammering on ESC...

I'm sure I could get comfortable in emacs, but then I'd be one of those guys that has to copy his config files everywhere.

I always hear this and even emacs people reinforce it. Maybe I'm abnormal but I don't do much configuration. My .emacs loads up a few modes specific to certain programming languages I use, that do syntax highlighting and such. There's maybe one or two global keybindings I can type in from memory if I have to, and otherwise I just use the defaults and it's fine.

These are both good points by you and the parent that I never really realized. If you don't 'like' (for lack of a better word) configuration then Vim is definitely the better editor.

I'm indeed the type of guy that carries his config files with him :) (be it on a USB stick, my website, Dropbox, GitHub, etc.)

You usually can with C-g though. Just a question of knowing the basics.

It seems like everything the author likes about vim are simply features he found more easily than he did in emacs. Duplicating a line in emacs is not difficult. emacs certainly has macros as well. A few simple google queries or looking in the emacs help system would reveal this very quickly. Not that there is anything wrong with vim, but the criticisms against emacs and other editors just seem lazy.

I switched the other way (vim to emacs), and whilst there are some annoyances and it's not quite as "pure", I'd never go back.

I'm surprised that an emacs user says that macros in vim are "awesome" - they're there and very straightforward to use in Emacs, too.

What I Don't Like About Wordpress

  Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 1310720) (tried to allocate 28 bytes) in /home/patmadd1/public_html/wp-settings.php on line 248

i use vim and emacs both every day for different purposes. it's my opinion that vim is a better text-editor, but emacs is clearly the more powerful of the two.

in the bitter end for me it comes down to whether or not i can swallow the indentation that emacs wants to shove down my throat for that particular language. for lisp, yes, for javascript, no thanks.

I just wish there was a good SLIME equivalent for Vim.

I like Vim because:

(1) I've used it more than Emacs and most keybindings are now muscle memory.

(2) Goto (1).

Site went down.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com