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Comment by greggyb | Hacker News Reader

I feel similarly to this. Emacs got extensibility down and probably would have destroyed Vi. Vim added Vimscript, but it is not what most would call elegant, nice, or any of the other things we want in a language. Adding extensibility is what kept Vim around.

I like the design of Emacs, and I also like Lisps in general, but the Vim editing model is the best for me.

It looks like Neovim is going to address many of the issues with Vim.

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As an emacs fan, I find vim model simple, abstract and efficient. Emacs default paradigm has amazing foundations but give fingercuts too often and lack composability while vim is quite self consistent (how ironic giving lisp essence).

That said, growing your editing system by evaluation a small function is still a bliss. Go lisps.

#repant

That's a very good way to put it.

Vim's editing model is much more functional (a la functional programming) than Emacs', whereas the latter's foundation is much more functional.

I keep thinking I should try Emacs with one of the Vim-ulators, but I've got a pretty good flow going in Vim and I've got a lot of other things I'm trying to learn right now, not to mention paying work to do.

Me too, since many people report emacs evil mode being pretty polished by now, I'm tempted to try a fresh emacs setup. There's also lispy.el, which is IIUC a paredit superset in vi-command-clothing.

It's not for Vim anymore but can adapt to many editing styles.

Although me too comments are not encouraged on HN, I've got to add a "Me too" to your "Me too". I used Emacs for 20 years and on a whim decided to learn Vim. Once I got the hang of it (telling the editor what I want to do rather than moving the cursor all over the place), I couldn't go back to Emacs. I've tried Evil a couple of times a few years ago and it just didn't work for anything other than superficial commands. The reports I'm reading in this thread are making me very, very excited to try it again!

Who knows, with the functional trends, and the work on guile emacs, maybe there will be a window for an emacs sibling with simpler core and combinator-like interactions.

vi objects feels a lot like lazy partial application with sane defaults: effect <| (move or stay) <| (count or 1)

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