I hear about the viper-mode and vimpulse stuff a lot, and while they go a long way towards helping emacs be more useful for text editing, I find the discontinuities disturbing.<p>For example, I am no longer in vi-mode if I end up in a help window of some sort. I cannot just Ctrl-W+Ctrl-W my way back to the original window; that suddenly deletes words. But I like working with multiple windows in vim sometimes. This gets frustrating for a vim user.<p>Also, macros are still not fixed, still using the emacs assumption of what people want for an enhanced vi. We want the easy qq and @q.<p>Definitely, if you are going to try it out, grab vimpulse. viper-mode is a joke to the developers coming from the vim world. vimpulse makes visual mode highlighting sensible.
Heh, I've ended up doing the same thing. The issue is that Vim's key scheme has a much better economy of motion (faster with less movement) while Emacs is much more extensible and flexible. So this is the compromise instead of creating yet another text editor.
I hear a lot about this vim vs emacs war. But I have never seen a battle, so to speak.<p>Where can I see videos of people actually <i>using</i> this text editors? A side by side comparison of interesting/useful features?<p>I really would like to choose, but the most I managed to find was a guy playing snake on his emacs.<p>I'm currently using the very basics features of vim, but just because I felt like it and it came with a tutor file.
Vim is cool because it's built in to every OS (except maybe Windows) and highly usable even without any configuration and requires very little resources.<p>For me knowing vim has proven a very productive skill. I often work on random new OS installations like virtual machines and cloud instances, and sometimes in very limited environments like embedded Linux devices. It works there just as well as in my regular Mac/Linux environments.
I used to do the same thing, but I missed out on a lot of good emacs shortcuts. Today I use the dvorak version of Xah Lee's layout. You get vim-like navigation by holding Meta.<p><a href="http://xahlee.org/emacs/ergonomic_emacs_keybinding.html" rel="nofollow">http://xahlee.org/emacs/ergonomic_emacs_keybinding.html</a>
Somewhat specious, since Emacs can be run inside Vim too.<p>This is a screenshot of Vim in Emacs in Vim: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/fxlm4.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/fxlm4.jpg</a>
I've tried using Emacs with Caps Lock as Control key, and it didn't worked well. So I changed Ctrl to (1)right-click-menu key (or whatever it's called) and to (2)right Alt; and turned Caps Lock into Alt. Now I can easily move around Emacs without hurting my pinky to much :). Long live Emacs!
Seriously? Seriously? It's 2010, and we're still having this religious debate? Pick an editor that works for you. Learn it. Use it. Done. NB I'm a heretic, I use both vi and emacs.