I frequently describe Spacemacs as a better vim than vim. Don't get me wrong, I've used vim for ages; I'll never stop editing server config with vi, nor will I stop getting mad when vi is actually vi and not vim.
But for a day to day code editor? Spacemacs is astonishingly good.
(Of course, Spacemacs is built on top of EVIL, as well as dozens of other packages. On the shoulders of giants, as we say.)
And the other thing that I could never get used to is that Emacs' terminals can't handle ncurses applications. I usually like to run Vim in a terminal multiplexer and combine it with various terminal utilities when needed, and Emacs doesn't support that - unless you run it in a terminal, but then Evil mode stops working properly...
I'm fine with Vim, but I'm glad I tried Emacs for a while because it does have some nice ideas.
Interesting, my impression was that custom keybindings was more flexible in Emacs + Evil than in Vim. It seemed easier to e.g. define new modes with separate keybindings, and if you use the GUI version, more distinct keybindings are available.
> And the other thing that I could never get used to is that Emacs' terminals can't handle ncurses applications.
It can now. The problem is that there are a lot of shells and terminals available in Emacs, so it's not always obvious which one supports what. But emacs-libvterm [1] is a "real" terminal inside Emacs, and supports ncurses apps well. (The website warns about being alpha level, but I used Emacs + Evil for about half a year, and it worked fine for me.)
[1]: https://github.com/akermu/emacs-libvterm
> I'm fine with Vim, but I'm glad I tried Emacs for a while because it does have some nice ideas.
I ended up with the same conclusion :).
Can you explain what limitations you mean? What keybindings has vim over emacs?
> And the other thing that I could never get used to is that Emacs' terminals can't handle ncurses applications.
libvterm seems to have solved this problem recently. Works well enough that I can use vim inside emacs.
Emacs is awesome and more powerful overall, but actually using Vim is easier -- from setting up keybindings, configuring your vimrc file, it's all quite simple compared to what you can do, and often do, in setting up Emacs.
But to be honest they are much closer to each other than either is to a more conventional/modern IDE. They are spiritual siblings for sure.
``` set -o vi ```
problem solved! no more emacs pollution!
> What are you basing it on? ... it looks like emacs.stackexchange.com is twice as active as vi.stackexchange.com
A couple of things about this. For myself and many others, the reason I started vi in the first place is it's been installed by default on many kinds of machines. On SCO Unix and AIX from my youth, for example, this was the editor you used on a vanilla install of a machine to get things going. So this is part of why the install base is larger.
Another part of why the emacs community is more active is that Vi is just an editor, while emacs is more of a programming language and I daresay nearly an operating system in its own right. Because of the amazing power and flexibility of emacs there's a lot more stuff to discuss for Emacs than Vi.
My computer books convinced me that emacs was the better editor, but it wasn’t installed on the server. vi was. So I learned vi and Perl on my lunch breaks.
Also, if you sum up all the JetBrains products (which you can get as IntelliJ Ultimate if you shell out the money), you land in the vicinity of 63% (not vim-related but a neat fact)
vim scp://user@myserver[:port]//path/to/file.txt
vi and the ex editor language are part of the POSIX standard and were around early in the history of BSD. See the history here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi
For a well worn joke on the subject, "Ed is the standard!": https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html
I know some people run Emacs in daemon mode, but it's not always convenient to do that
This and when I ssh into any machine, I know there will be a vi at the very least
You could use emacs for that. Editing over ssh using TRAMP works perfectly in every case I've used it.
2) I've found vim's plugin systems (Pathogen, Vundle, vim-plug) vastly more intuitive than Emacs' version with package-install and activating one of several repositories (Milk, ELPA, MELPA, whatever) - you install the same plugin regardless of whether you're using Vundle or vim-plug
3) vim and its packages are vastly easier to configure - this is subjective and may be much improved in Doom Emacs/Spacemacs, but in general vim packages have a bunch of global variables that you can set to a number or a string whereas most emacs packages need you to define elisp functions and/or nontrivial data structures, with no sane defaults to fall back on if you want things just to work
This post is what got me started on Vim: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-mos...
- (original) vi was on most unices from the mid-80s onwards out of the box
- (gnu/lucid) emacs was an additional install (not getting into other emacs flavors - original teco emacs was fairly small i believe).
- original vi just had basic editing and at some point a hardcoded lisp mode, no addons vs gnu emacs which was a programmable editing environment running within a lisp interpreter - remeber in the early days, people built whole custom hardware to be able to run lisp with sufficient complexity (see also: lisp machines, twenex, etc), so using lisp for your editor was in some sense the definition of 'overkill', depending on ones view of what an editor should do
- Also, from late-80s->90s era if you wanted a GUI for your text editor you probably used emacs, and real vi never had a gui option - put another way emacs was the only one of the two linked to gui libraries.
- vim vs vi: most obvious difference (IMHO) feature wise is that vim adds vimscript, which is an interpreted programming language, so now editing modes are extensible, etc (as was the case in emacs before). detail: vim codebase is not based on vi codebase.
since vi was just about everywhere and emacs was a (fairly large) package, you had more general vi knowledge vs emacs 'in the culture' since even an emacs user might need to know vi but not usually the other way around, and so vi (later vim, as linux distros switched their 'default vi' to 'vim') gained more install base by default. Then, people hearing about emacs likely hear the 'vi vs emacs' arguments and never try it since there are now many more choices, they've learned vi, they prefer an IDE, etc (in the old days there was much less choice, main 2 were vi and emacs, and emacs was probably somewhere on your managed LAN somewhere if you wanted to give it a shot)
most of the 'vi vs emacs' arguments are rooted in the real-vi vs fsf-emacs era and are basically obsolete in a modern vim era, since everyone is using gui library vim with vimscript, which basically means the same thing in terms of 'bloat' (both editors contain engines to display text in cli or gui mode and embed a language interpreter). Basically what was once valid internet lore kept getting past down, and the 'minimalism' of vim was confused with being 'minimal' in terms of what people meant in the original vi-vs-emacs discussions. Emacs does contain 'non editor' functions e.g. networking, etc, so the core is probably a bit bigger than the core of vim, but when people are still using these comparisons and talking about 'emacs bloat' while their preferred editor is some electron based thing, we've lost a bit of the point/message..
Today, I don't put much stock into anyone expressing an opinion in the "vi vs emacs" wars, because 90% of the people claiming a preference for vi seem to actually be vim users. Using vim is a much more pleasant experience than using good old classic vi.