I spent this entire weekend setting up Evil mode for Emacs, in the Emacs Starter Kit package. It's been decent so far. Evil mode is surprisingly good, and I really don't think it could come any closer to vim emulation for Emacs. Took a lot of googling around to set up some basic plugins that I need - projectile for CtrlP etc. I think the only thing that I need atm is Magit integration with Evil and I'll be good to go.<p>What has been amazing so far is that even after using vim for almost 3 years, I'd been sort of afraid of diving deep into the config system (I made do with copy-pasting some popular vimrc files) and it was good enough, but in the short span of 2 days, I've actually gotten to know more about emacs configuration style than I ever did about vim. And I suspect it will only get better as I start to learn Emacs Lisp.
I don't really understand the comment about etags; if you use ctags in Vim, you'll get the same kind of functionality. If you want something more advanced, Emacs has support for cscope and GNU Global which give you more features. Considering that he's interested in having something better than VimScript and wants org-mode, it seems that Emacs + Evil would really be the best fit for him.
I use a text editor because using a text editor that you've mastered is pleasant. (I'm an Emacs user fwiw.)<p>I think we should stop trying to rationalize this choice.<p>Or rather, we should realize that we like text editors because we went through a long training and acquired complex skills which are fun to put in practice. Being a power user of Emacs or Vim is is satisfying, the same way mastering a video game is satisfying.
I suffer from the same thing. I've gone even futher: I've customized my tiling wm to work with the vim keybindings; my file manager also works with those keybindings; I use vimperator, a firefox plugin, that has those keybindings...<p>There's a lot of stuff that I wish were better in vim, but, at the end of the day, it gets my work done better than anything else out there, so I don't have any reason to move away from it. It works amazingly well with tmux (otherwise, I would be using emacs + evil -which I actually use for Clojure-). And I'm pretty excited about neovim :). They are doing an outstanding job.
"/ for searching (really, no other editor has made it this simple)"
Well, it's really esc-/ which is no easier than ctrl-f. Or am I missing something?<p>Edit:<p>Same with
"1G to go to the top of the file, G to go to the bottom" -
esc-1-shift-g vs ctrl-home. Same with ctrl-end.
Funnily enough, I'm going to other way: long time Emacs users, getting closer to switching to evil-mode (Vi emulation in Emacs). Doubt I'll ever leave Emacs though.<p>As an aside, how does one keep up with Emacs package development? There is lots of stuff that's new to me (e.g. I just found out about company-mode). I'd like to have some way to have this information pushed to me, rather than having to go searching.
First you'll learn how to orientate around text quickly using normal mode, then you'll start playing with tabs, splits and buffers to search between multiple files, and then you'll start using registers to save phrases and regular expressions to search directories. At that point you'll never want to leave Vim again.<p>:wq
I've learned to love the modal nature of vim, or rather, the notion that text entry ('insert' mode) is merely one aspect of manipulating text. The combination of movement of commands is very powerful and these days I feel naked when I use editors without this ability.<p>My first dedicated text editor was BBedit (when it was still freeware), and for many years had extended experiments with other editors, always eventually returning to BBEdit. Something about it always clicked with me, and I felt like Siegel and co. fundamentally understood both the Mac and the needs of programmers.<p>These days I keep BBedit around for its excellent diff tool, syntax-highlighted multi-file grep search and replace, and its decent project browsing. But it's mostly a supplement to vim (MacVim), which I use all the time when I'm actually in there editing text.
One feature he missed is its not as configurable, and in some situations that is awesome.<p>So you're doing something weird, manually, but I repeat myself because if it was BAU you'd automate the whole process in puppet or similar. The local vim will work more or less like every other vim out there. Can't really say that with emacs.<p>If you're traveling somewhere weird, vim is a great travel companion. Not because it can be compiled anywhere (lots of editors can be compiled anywhere) but because it works the same anywhere.
Yay, I'm glad J got a shout-out even if it is one of the rejected editors. I've loved using J in the past and have even made a few releases of J on sourceforge [0]. I've attempted to move to github as well [1]. Sadly, I haven't found much time to work on it -- paid work and family take precedence. Oh, and I too love using vim as well.<p><pre><code> [0] http://armedbear-j.sourceforge.net/
[1] https://github.com/kevinkrouse/j/tree/master/j</code></pre>
> and ‘Esc’ to move around again.<p>For me personally this is the reason I stopped using Vi(m) except for occasional config file editing on unfamiliar servers, and started looking elsewhere (Emacs) for my goto text editor. I'm not looking to switch, but it genuinely interests me how Vi users put up with the constant need to strain their pinky to switch to command mode.
I can't stop using vi key bindings, whether that's Evil for Emacs, VsVim for Visual Studio, the Intellij one, Sublime, etc..<p>But my days of using straight Vim are over. For a straight text editor, I finally got over the hump with Emacs recently, and I'm not going back.
I went back to Sublime after using Vim for a while but then realized I was going to have a terminal open 24/7 anyway so what's the point? Then I learned how to use a terminal multiplexer and now Sublime and other GUI editors just hinder my workflow. IMHO if you're a programmer you should know how to use a terminal to the point that you prefer it over most GUIs (of course, you should always use whatever has the feature you <i>need</i>).<p>Oh, and on a side note:<p>Vim and terminal usage <i>is not</i> a "time sink" and it pains me whenever I hear people who consider them selves "programmers" claim it to be. If you haven't learned how to use the terminal yet (or haven't found a use for it) then you aren't a respectable programmer IMHO. I would not read a book on programming by someone who doesn't know how to use a terminal and I would not take a class on programming taught by a professor who doesn't know how to use a terminal.
It’s great that people are so inspired by Vim that they continue to create new plugins, tutorials and websites like Vim Awesome: <a href="http://vimawesome.com" rel="nofollow">http://vimawesome.com</a>
>q to record a macro; @ to execute it again<p>Is using macros' really common? I haven't yet figured out in when and where to use macros during my workflow.
It's unfortunate that, to me, the title implies there's something wrong with a person who still uses vim and nothing could be further from the truth.