Wanna have fun with emacs? Try to integrate evil mode nicely in different plugins. Especially if you use totally different key bindings in vi (non qwerty layout for example). It was very painful experience for me. Yes, vim is far from ideal, yes neo-vim is looking like to be next iteration in vim evolution, yes no parallel tasks execution is pain. But at the same time there is vimproc. For clojure integration there is fireplace.vim which is also amazing in my opinion, for git there is fugitive. I don't see any real comparison in this post, more like "I was bored with vim, now I use emacs".
Gah, the tutorial keybindings! They are mad. I've been using emacs for a very long time, and I can't imagine using those to navigate. Emacs has perfectly reasonable default keybindings these days, they just aren't the ones mentioned in the tutorial.<p>Command: move down one line<p>What vi uses: j<p>What the emacs tutorial suggests: C-n<p>What I use in emacs: the down arrow
Emacs + evil, sure, but <i>please</i> don't forget vim + slimv. I tried emacs for a bit when I was first jumping into lisp, but was also evaluating vim at the same time. After about 6 weeks I was having <i>fun</i> with vim. About a year later, I was really fast in vim. Fast forward another year or two, I think in vim. There are no modes or movements or searches. There's just what's in my brain and it sort of writes itself. Granted, I'll stop and think to record macros here and there, but otherwise it's all really fluid. Add the fact that I do lots of server admin to the mix, and heyyyy there's vim already there. How ya doing ol' buddy?<p>Then you add slimv to the mix. Honestly I never gave slime a fair shake. I barely scratched the surface. But once I got slimv up and running, I felt like I didn't need to learn emacs+slime. Maybe there are some things I don't know about that I'm missing out on, but slimv, like vim, let's me think in lisp.<p>So if you're a lisper and you like vim, don't jump ship yet! Give slimv a shot.
Emacs+Evil is the next Vim.<p>And yes, CtrlP is probably the thing you'll miss most.<p>But all the other things I got from switching from Vim to Emacs+Evil easily outweigh the missing CtrlP.<p>Vim was great, until I wanted to customize it heavily. It is simply not made to facilitate things like: child processes, SSH, understanding my code, a visual interface for Git.
Whether it's vim or emacs, I've always been amazed how these tools can become an extension of the brain like an instrument whose purpose is to materialize a thought process. Framed that way, the editor wars look like a pianist debating with a violinist of the superiority of their respective instruments to convey human emotion.<p>Watching a seasoned vim or emacs user create, mold, shape, reformat text like it was a piece of clay in the hands of a potter is truly inspiring.<p>As for me, my instrument of choice is Sublime Text (which, I guess, downgrades me to the status of a flute player), though I occasionally use vim for Ops stuff. I think there are some mac-centric UX patterns that I have a hard time giving up.
Another option for "modal" editing in emacs is god-mode(1). It lets you use emacs commands without modifier keys. I have it set to change my mode-line color when it's activated, it's great if you want a little taste of vim but not the problem of trying to shoehorn vim key-bindings into emacs.<p>1. <a href="https://github.com/chrisdone/god-mode" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/chrisdone/god-mode</a>
I don't know why, I find this post greatly uninformative. Yes, you can have some kind of Vim mode in Emacs (as you can in Sublime) and yes it takes time to remember key-bindings. If you have years of experience in Vim, why would you expect to get used to Emacs keybindings in a short time?<p>It's like moving to a foreign country and then continue to buy and to eat only your old local food, and go out and talk to only people from your old home. You will miss so much.
Until it goes wrong or you have to delve into elisp or you get carpal tunnel...<p>After 20 years of switching back and forth I decided I wanted an extensible editor not a programming language with an editor built in. That's worked well for me.<p>I really always just want the simplest thing that will work as I need to rely on it entirely and understand how it works. If I was to use emacs, I'd probably use mg as shipped with OpenBSD.
I still do not undertand the devotion that people have with these text editors. I prefer Vim however I could see myself using it soley or even half the time. I feel like I know the basic commands and it is fast but with the ease of a sublime text or something similar why do people still use these pieces of software so frequently? (Not a rhetorical question)
A relevant comic:<p><a href="http://hackles.org/cgi-bin/archives.pl?request=284" rel="nofollow">http://hackles.org/cgi-bin/archives.pl?request=284</a>
I do wonder what it would be like to use an editor where the main cursor navigation was forward/backward incremental search. One case of this is the Canon CAT[1] word processor, which used "LEAP" keys for cursor movement (and nothing else).<p>I'm often curious how productive it would be to use while coding.<p>1: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat</a>
Bonus link: <a href="http://clickamericana.com/media/advertisements/the-canon-cat-word-processor-1987" rel="nofollow">http://clickamericana.com/media/advertisements/the-canon-cat...</a>
I'm both a vim and emacs user. I love vim for all the reasons everyone always mentions, but emacs comes out ahead consistently basically because emacs-lisp is so much more usable to me than vimscript. I find it much easier to create or modify plugins in emacs... Don't like the (often overfeatureful) functionality of a plugin? Change it!
The last time I tried Emacs+Evil I found that when pressing Ctrl+[ there was a slight delay when moving back into command mode. I was constantly tripping up when typing furiously.<p>This alone was enough to move me back to Vim. Everything else about Emacs was awesome. I would love to go back if I could get over this one problem..
I was looking at Slackware Linux the other day and came across this page <a href="http://www.slackware.com/install/softwaresets.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.slackware.com/install/softwaresets.php</a>. I enjoyed how emacs got its own software set due to its size.
> I completely do not understand how anyone can use Emacs’ default keybindings.<p>I completely do not understand how switching modes is a good idea in an editor. It just doesn't fit in my brain somehow. I start typing and randomly end up pasting and cutting. I want to paste and cut it randomly types my commands in insert mode.<p>Emacs cords are pretty intuitive to me. I don't know many: just moving, saving, creating 2 windows, search & replace, cutting and pasting. There are hundreds more, but you can get away with a few basic ones.<p>Save needing to rebind the Ctrl key to CapsLock, emacs key-bindings are optimized to not have to move the hands to the mouse or arrow keys, which I appreciate. Vim's are as well, but again I don't like modes, so there is that.
So when i'm programming I find myself spending far more time thinking about what to type next than actually typing it, seems to me like there isn't much to gain by learning vim/emacs or am I missing something?
My main concern with Emacs (at least on Windows) is that it actually crashes every now and then. I haven't dealt with many programs in the past few years that do still that.
If you want to see what Emacs is capable of, check "Emacs Mini Manual" that has the demo at the beginning: <a href="http://tuhdo.github.io/emacs-tutor.html" rel="nofollow">http://tuhdo.github.io/emacs-tutor.html</a><p>Then, if you worry about fuzzy project finders, better one exists that does not need fuzzy (I ditched all fuzzy finders for it): <a href="http://tuhdo.github.io/helm-intro.html" rel="nofollow">http://tuhdo.github.io/helm-intro.html</a>
So many Emacs articles the recent days... please tell me: Should I really switch to Emacs as a web developer? Is it really superior to SublimeText and Brackets for a web dev?
I like that he mentioned CtrlP. It's the single plugin that prevents me from switching to Emacs.<p>There is currently nothing in Emacs (last I played with this was 3 months ago) that is 100% equivalent to CtrlP. There are some close approximations but they're not as good the real deal. I can understand how Emacs guys won't even notice this because they've not worked with something that's better than the best they have, but for Vim guys it sucks.
(I'm currently toying with the editor able (ql:quickload "able") (able:start), so at this moment, I'm not in a good position to figth at those thumb wars... but, as long time and happy emacs user, I need to tell the world that "little pinky" is alive and tipping, thanks)<p>You can have it all, emacs, and vi... so, what is the bigg fuss?
Vim's home-row commands are great... Unless you use a non-QWERTY keyboard layout.<p>A lot of developers forget that there exist other methods of input, and mnemonic-based shortcuts are one of those things that make a lot more sense than attempting to optimise for a tiny reduction in finger-movement (which ought to be the domain of the input-device anyway).
I use emacs with the 'viper' mode extension, along with a custom keymap that i made that places the keys i use most on and near the home keys: <a href="https://github.com/bshanks/viperre" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/bshanks/viperre</a><p>I actually use viperre with a Colemak keyboard map, but there's a QWERTY mode too.
I really wanted to use Org-mode, but my vim muscle memory and lack of knowledge of keybindings to do useful things like copy/paste and move around with more than just arrow keys were preventing me from being productive. Finally got Evil installed and haven't looked back! Evil and Org-mode work great together.
Is anybody besides me still having the problem with Emacs on Mavericks where the OS X distnoted process gradually eats up gigabytes of RAM? It seems to have to do with running multiple instances of Emacs.
emacs-prelude is a nice way to get started with emacs if you are a vim user: <a href="https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude</a><p>You can enable the prelude-evil.el module and start out with a nice set of bindings. It would be sweet if there were some more pull requests to make the evil-mode bindings in prelude more closely match vim.
notepad and other modern solutions... they are ubiquitous for a reason. typing is such a tiny part of programmer productivity compared to thinking...<p>... do a little more thinking and never have this problem again, learn to adapt to whatever text editor is on the system etc.
It's still too slow for me. I have often several vims open, usually for a short time, and I'm not going to start a daemon in my session to have a decent startup time, that's unreasonable. Also, even setting a theme like solarized dark turned out to be a headache last time I tried. I think I'll wait for neovim.