[HN Gopher] From Vim to Emacs in fourteen days (2015)
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From Vim to Emacs in fourteen days (2015)
Author : Assossa
Score : 55 points
Date : 2021-03-11 11:47 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.aaronbieber.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.aaronbieber.com)
| mkl95 wrote:
| I have been using Emacs for several years now, I love how easy it
| makes it to quickly browse and edit code. The only downside is
| that coding without Emacs keybindings makes me uncomfortable and
| kind of sloppy. Fortunately most IDEs have an Emacs plugin.
| sigmonsays wrote:
| I went from vim to emacs for development in go and python. I Went
| with doom emacs, which is a configuration distribution already
| prebuilt which is friendly to vimm users (ie, evil mode). It was
| rough at first, required writing lots of cheat sheets and also
| changing workflows a little. I feel much more productive in emacs
| than vim. IMHO, its more straightforward to google "How to do X
| in emacs" than "how to do X in vim" and actually end up with a
| productive configuration change.
| keithnz wrote:
| wouldn't this just be....
|
| How to go from Vim to any other Editor/IDE and use Vim bindings
| ...
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| I'm curious to hear from folks who have switched between the two,
| and have lasted for more than a year on both. If you've learned
| more than the basics and both became muscle memory, which did you
| end up sticking to?
|
| (Vim user for 23 years, Emacs user of none... but interested
| because of Lisp)
| alex_smart wrote:
| Vim user for 12 years, Emacs user for 5. I prefer and mainly
| use Emacs after I finally "got it". My previous attempts at
| learning Emacs weren't as successful because I was too biased
| about what a good editor should be like because of my
| familiarity with vim - mainly I was annoyed about silly things
| like having to press 4 keypresses for tasks that would take two
| keypresses in vim. So, if you decide to give Emacs a try, keep
| your preconceptions away and accept that it will take months
| before you "get" Emacs, the same way it probably took months
| before you "got" vim.
|
| I still use vim when I am at a new system or on a remote
| server, but Emacs is love, Emacs is home. It is the most open,
| discoverable and hackable software system I have ever used.
| Every action, button, keybinding is easily introspectable - and
| it takes only a few clicks to get even to the _source_ of the
| functionality that you are interested in. Almost every aspect
| of this system is modifiable by the user, even on the fly.
|
| The only downside is that it is so much fun to play with your
| emacs config that you might spend too much time doing that
| instead of productive work. By contrast, vimscript is so
| disgusting that I don't think that I ever wrote a single line
| of vim config that wasn't copy-pasted from somewhere.
| auslegung wrote:
| I'm a nvim user of 2 years, a doom emacs user of 6 months. I
| don't intend to go back to nvim because org mode is just too
| wonderful, and doom emacs does a great job of making emacs
| speedy, though of course it could never be as speedy as vim, I
| rarely notice it
| vcxy wrote:
| I have used both daily for over a year (and emacs alone for a
| few years). Once I was used to vim, I started using evil in
| emacs. So, at least in reference to muscle memory, I ended up
| sticking with vim. The thing is, evil is a mostly complete vim
| implementation. If I were forced to choose one editor, it would
| definitely be emacs.
| Jach wrote:
| I'll just say if you want to do Common Lisp, vim works fine, so
| don't let that hold you back from pursuing your interest. The
| slimv plugin is good. (Some people also like vlime better. To
| be honest I've had some buggy experiences with both, I suggest
| try both and pick what you like. vlime has one debugging
| improvement in that you don't need to manually call (swank-
| backend:restart-frame N).)
|
| I'd like to give emacs one more chance, but haven't gotten
| around to it. Last time I tried Spacemacs (for about a month,
| sorry not a year) and ultimately didn't like it, I'm planning
| on trying Doom Emacs next.
| TrisMcC wrote:
| I was a vim user for 16 years (very proficient -- other
| developers in whatever office I was in would ask me vim
| questions) when I switched to emacs about 8 years ago. I
| switched for curiousity and to check out evil mode and magit.
|
| A couple years ago during a lull in a dev cycle I built a
| neovim setup to see the state of that art but I didn't stick
| with it.
|
| I've rewritten my emacs configuration many times, swapped
| between spacemacs, vanilla, and doom. I am currently on doom
| emacs with my customizations.
|
| I also do not use evil mode anymore. Default emacs bindings
| make a lot of sense to me. I can still use vim with muscle
| memory, but I reach for "mg" if I need a quick edit more often
| than not.
| dang wrote:
| Just for fun, here are some of the larger past threads. Others?
|
| _After over a decade of Vim, I'm hooked on Emacs_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16551796 - March 2018 (161
| comments)
|
| _A pragmatic decision on GNU Emacs versus Vim for programming_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13590944 - Feb 2017 (59
| comments)
|
| _Why I switched from Vim to Emacs_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13130775 - Dec 2016 (101
| comments)
|
| _From Vim to Emacs_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8367384 - Sept 2014 (116
| comments)
|
| _Emacs and Vim_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8084359 -
| July 2014 (275 comments)
|
| _Vi and Vim vs. Emacs Shootout and Deal_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3205828 - Nov 2011 (52
| comments)
|
| _Some thoughts on Emacs and Vim_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2229040 - Feb 2011 (40
| comments)
|
| _How a Vim user converts to Emacs_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2036586 - Dec 2010 (66
| comments)
|
| _On vim vs emacs_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1374916
| - May 2010 (28 comments)
|
| _Debian 's Vim maintainer switches to Emacs_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=341492 - Oct 2008 (32
| comments)
| davidw wrote:
| Emacs vs Vim is like comfort food for software-related online
| discussions.
| bitwize wrote:
| And it's even more useless fluff than it was back in the day
| because people used Vim and Emacs in large numbers back then.
| These days the vast bulk of professional developers use
| Visual Studio Code. Compared to VSCode vs. IntelliJ, Vim vs.
| Emacs is a sideshow at best.
| every wrote:
| From Vim or Emacs to Nano in fourteen minutes...
| mjfl wrote:
| I started with emacs and never learned vim. What am I missing?
| sumnole wrote:
| I'd like to ask the opposite question as someone who knows Vim
| but not Emacs. What am I missing if I'm only concerned with
| text editing?
| newlisper wrote:
| Nothing, if you are only concerned with text editing.
| Scarbutt wrote:
| A different way of doing the same thing for text editing, on
| which both are great. I use evil-mode just because of muscle
| memory from vim.
|
| I have been using a jetbrain IDE recently and surprisingly, the
| vim plugin is pretty decent. So knowing vim lets me use both
| the IDE and emacs with less friction.
| asciimov wrote:
| Modal editing.
|
| Command mode lets you manipulate text using a full keyboard as
| shortcuts. Depending on setup this can reduce the amount of
| chording you do.
|
| Visual mode lets you select text. By character, line, or
| region/block. I find this easier than emacs selection.
|
| Insert mode what you use to enter text.
| auslegung wrote:
| A decent text editor
| gotts wrote:
| I used vim for a decade and tried to switch to vanilla emacs. I
| didn't like code navigation in emacs at all.
|
| After a few weeks of fighting it, I switched to evil-mode emacs
| and was pretty happy since then.
| fileeditview wrote:
| stellar speed
| syntheticnature wrote:
| Vi's sense of composability. For example, 'd' is the delete
| command, but what does it delete? It deletes across a motion.
| What is a motion? Could be any movement mode supported by the
| editor, which ranges from simple cursor motions to motions
| involving words or blocks to forms of searching to raw line
| number jumps.
|
| So, once you learn a vi command, you can use it with all the
| motions you already know, and once you learn a motion, you can
| use it with all the commands you already know.
|
| The other aspect, that is more insidiously useful: vi is almost
| everywhere, and will easily fit on an embedded system. It's a
| rare server that doesn't have it, either. This is definitely
| vi, not vim, when I say this, though.
| jes5199 wrote:
| I've used vim for more than 20 years, but lately I'm finding
| that now that `prettier` and `black` can just reformat code
| wholesale, I don't have to care as much about the precise
| tiny edits that vim is so good at. And when I'm not worried
| about those things, I start to notice that modern IDEs have
| much smarter syntax checking and whole-project search than
| I've ever seen in vim, even with plugins. So I think I'm
| moving on.
| soldeace wrote:
| I can relate. Going from Emacs to evil-mode (not pure vim)
| has been a bliss. Text and code editing feels almost like
| playing a game.
| flowerlad wrote:
| I am conversant with both. You are not really missing anything.
| I use vi when emacs is not already installed and I need to
| quickly edit a file. That's the main difference, for me. vi is
| already there, but emacs has to be installed.
| bogwog wrote:
| Vim is my go-to terminal-based text editor, and I used it for a
| decent amount of time, but when I finally decided to switch to
| something like Sublime Text, I never felt the need to go back.
|
| Maybe it's because I'm not a "touch typist" who uses a home row
| and all that stuff, so the keybindings optimized for that don't
| really help me that much.
|
| I do like Vim though, and it's an insanely useful skill to have
| because I can SSH into any server and edit config files like if I
| were straight up programming.
| sumnole wrote:
| You can enable Vintage Mode in Sublime Text to get the best of
| both worlds.
| hirundo wrote:
| > If, like me, you're curious enough to give Emacs a try...
|
| So curiosity rather than conversion. Six year later is he still
| using Emacs? Went back to Vim? Moved on to something else?
|
| I have enough years invested in muscle memory of Vim itself and
| various plugins that what curiosity I have about Emacs is well
| controlled. I doubt I have runway left to get to the same
| productivity in another editor.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| Well the author used Evil mode which is vi emulation for emacs
| and quite popular. Their last post that was obviously about
| emacs was late 2019 but they don't blog much. So I'd guess they
| still use emacs
| anand-bala wrote:
| This is a great point. Personally, the only reason I would want
| to switch to Emacs is Org mode but the muscle memory for custom
| Vim and Tmux keymaps is hard to give up.
| gotts wrote:
| emacs is very customizable.
|
| I had the same fear before switching to emacs(in evil mode),
| so I changed some of the default shortcuts that I was
| accustomed in vim(e.g. nerdtree/treemacs). It's not that
| hard.
|
| The whole enormous productivity boost that you get from Org
| mode(and org babel/literate programming) is well worth the
| temporary minor inconveniences of learning the tool.
| newlisper wrote:
| FWIW, I use emacs(with evil) inside tmux, so you can keep
| your flow if you are willing to invest in the transition.
| zarkov99 wrote:
| An interesting path is to go from regular emacs to emacs with
| vim bindings, which is what I did, also in around 14 days. Its
| painful, but good for you brain. And you get the best of both
| worlds, or so I like to think.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| I tried that too for a bit over two weeks. In the end I had a
| comfortable configuration, but with noticably worse
| performance and a lot of inconsistencies. Whenever I use
| Emacs I kind of like the concept but at the same time feel
| like the good parts are buried beneath countless random
| additions that should have been optional plugins. I dare to
| claim that >95% of Emacs users do not use its integrated
| Tetris implementation, for example.
| tyingq wrote:
| _" Finally, install evil-mode, the Vim emulation package for
| Emacs"_
|
| Anyone use this regularly? Does it kill off some of the upside of
| emacs?
| hypersoar wrote:
| I don't use evil mode, but I don't see how it could kill any of
| the upside of Emacs, which has very little to do with
| keybindings.
| tyingq wrote:
| I was assuming it introduced things more meaningful than
| keybindings, like separate command and insert modes. I am not
| an EMACS user.
| tobbe2064 wrote:
| It does:) that does not conflict with emacs in general :]
| dan-robertson wrote:
| Evil mode is very popular (see doom emacs or spacemacs which
| try to integrate lots of emacs extensions with evil mode on by
| default)
| asciimov wrote:
| I use it regularly. It integrates quite well with emacs and if
| you use the evil-collection you can add vim-ness to other
| modes.
|
| Personally, I mostly just use evil for modal editing, as I am a
| long time vim user. Then I use the emacs shortcuts on top of
| that.
| tarboreus wrote:
| Really, no. It's a huge portion of the user base of Emacs, and
| gets a lot of support. Might be a few issues here and there but
| highly surmountable and you'll be in company.
| efiecho wrote:
| Emacs is a great OS but it lacks a decent text editor.
| maximilianroos wrote:
| For those who use Vim bindings, and would like to try out emacs,
| I'd suggest trying Spacemacs:
|
| https://www.spacemacs.org/
|
| It has "evil mode" by default -- the vim bindings.
|
| I picked this up at Jane Street, where much of the internal
| tooling is in emacs. I still use it wherever I can't get a good
| vscode setup, and it has some advantages over vscode.
| andrewzah wrote:
| This article fails to explain -why- one would want to switch to
| emacs from vim.
|
| Org-mode and configuring emacs in a lisp-like are cool, but are
| not worth re-learning everything for me. I put that time in
| already by reading "Practical Vim" by Drew Neil and other vim
| literature online. I'm sure everyone is already aware, but vi is
| available basically everywhere. This has saved my ass at least
| twice where I couldn't access vim or had internet access to
| install XYZ editor.
|
| So as a power vim user I see no reason to switch. If I can't use
| vim, most editors now have support for reasonable vim bindings.
| So I use that for Jetbrains' products / Joplin / Insomnia / etc.
| asciimov wrote:
| For me, I wanted access to org-mode, as well as the emacs
| ecosystem of packages.
|
| emacs has good vim emulation through the evil package.
|
| Doom emacs, is a decent place to start for a vimmer.
| flowerlad wrote:
| One good reason is programmability. You can write lisp scripts
| to automate some routine editing.
|
| For me the main reason I prefer emacs is the key bindings are
| better.
|
| Another reason that emacs (the real thing) is available
| everywhere. You can install it on Linux and Windows. And you
| can run it in console mode (terminal) as well as GUI (even on
| Windows).
| thewakalix wrote:
| That depends on what the meaning of "everywhere" is.
| alex_smart wrote:
| How many lines of vimscript have you written? No, copy-pasting
| config lines from someone's dotfiles doesn't count. How many
| times have you opened the source code of some vim plugin you
| are using and tried to modify what it does?
|
| If I were to hazard a guess: zero. That was also me during ten
| years of vim usage. Vim encourages the mindset of mastery =
| learning a bunch of tricks, remembering them and incorporating
| them into muscle memory.
|
| Emacs on the other hand encourages the mindset that my editor
| is a programmable tool, I am a programmer, I can make it do
| whatever I want. You are always just one click away from the
| source code implementing any functionality of your editor,
| which you can, if you choose to do so, modify and evaluate on
| the fly.
|
| > vi is available basically everywhere
|
| Emacs-like shortcuts are also available wherever you have
| readline (e.g. many shells).
|
| >This has saved my ass at least twice where I couldn't access
| vim or had internet access to install XYZ editor.
|
| In those situations, I also still use vim. But 99% of the time,
| I am not on some remote machine, I am on my personal computer,
| so I can choose to use a tool that is not installed by default.
| The basic vim commands I have internalized over the years are
| sufficient for those odd jobs.
|
| >So as a power vim user I see no reason to switch.
|
| To each their own. Personally, I think that Emacs is a much
| more rewarding tool to _master_.
|
| >most editors now have support for reasonable vim bindings
|
| So does Emacs :)
|
| In fact Emacs' vim plugin is probably has the most feature rich
| of all the vim emulations.
| boogies wrote:
| > This article fails to explain -why- one would want to switch
| to emacs from vim.
|
| In other words it does one thing, hopefully well. The
| philosophy behind the original vi, and IIRC originally vim too
| -- didn't it previously have an explicit non-goal of adding an
| embedded terminal emulator? If it did, those days seem over, so
| you IMO you might as well use an editor that does many things
| well (eg. having a proper designed language as the default for
| configuration, not the bodge that is vimscript with Lua as just
| a secondary option ), if you're going to use an IDE and not an
| actually minimal text editor like vis or sam.
|
| Fortunately you don't need to 're-learn everything' with evil-
| mode. I doubt other editors' support for reasonable vim
| bindings is as complete as the common base of Spacemacs and
| Doom, they certainly aren't as complete of operating systems,
| capable of being your WM (EXWM) or your init system or shell
| (http://www.informatimago.com/linux/emacs-on-user-mode-
| linux....), nor capable of running in a terminal over ssh.
| DennisP wrote:
| Emacs itself has good vim bindings these days.
| jeromenerf wrote:
| I just use emacs+evil for org only. Org is feature rich
| (bloated?) but these dynamic code blocks in documents are just
| too good.
|
| I prefer vim for everything else and the general "minimalist"
| approach in particular. Emacs seems to appeal to people who
| like to do everything within one tool.
| e12e wrote:
| I know org.mode is a deep rabbit hole - but do you have an
| example of "dynamic code blocks in documents"?
|
| I've recently switched my "notes.txt" buffer in (neo)vim to
| markdown ("notes.md) - along with a slightly more magical
| syntax plug-in - and I'm pleasantly surprised by the quality
| of life improvements from having multiple code/script
| snippets highlighted in-line (eg: ```SQL (... Snippet...) ```
| in a paragraph followed by some notes and a block of bash
| etc).
|
| But I rarely execute the blocks _in_ from vim - I do a bit of
| copy-pasting though (I don 't generally fit a terminal
| buffer/window _in_ vim, I use a separatewindow with gnome-
| terminal or Sakura. I tried term-in-vim,bbut didn 't quite
| like the flow. Maybe I should try again).
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