Re:Emfy: Emacs for You – Quickly set up vanilla Emacs for ed...
by aidenn0 on Wednesday December 29, 2021 @04:50PM
(#29730513)
I've been using some vi-like since around 1990. I guess I'm still using a vi-like as I'm now using emacs with evil-mode for most things.
What got me to switch was developing in common lisp. I hear things have much improved, but at the time the best setup for vim was a really hacky tmux (or maybe gnu screen?) repl that was spawned and vaguely controllable from vim. I started by just using emacs as a lisp REPL on steroids, and then started to do more with it.
My fingers know more vim key combinations than my brain, and they refused to change for emacs. evil-mode didn't exist yet, so I settled on using viper (an older vi-like mode) and any time my muscle-memory did something that didn't work, I figured out how to add that particular key binding. It was super hacky, but Worked For Me to let me use emacs for lisp dev and vim for everything else.
From then on it was all downhill; there were so many things that you could do in vim, but were harder and the vim packages tended to be less polished than the emacs packages. Neovim seemed to recognize some of the issues with extending vim, but (at the time) was really a terminal-first editor. Now that I could switch between the two without my fingers complaining, when something was better on emacs, I added that to my "list of things I do with emacs."
Eventually most of what I do is in emacs rather than vim, and I reach for emacs first. I had to engrave some music for my son the other day; I've used lilypond (kind of LaTeX for music) in the past so I decided to try it with emacs. Turns out lilypond ships with an emacs mode that does all the basic things, plus registers a command for running lilypond on the current buffer. Tile my pdf viewer next to emacs and I can see the results with a single command.
I can (and have) set up a similar thing with vim, but the community around emacs seems to really take seriously that emacs is more of a gui toolkit with really good text support, while the parts of vim community is suspicious of any significant new functionality to vim that isn't specifically about editing text.
What got me to switch was developing in common lisp. I hear things have much improved, but at the time the best setup for vim was a really hacky tmux (or maybe gnu screen?) repl that was spawned and vaguely controllable from vim. I started by just using emacs as a lisp REPL on steroids, and then started to do more with it.
My fingers know more vim key combinations than my brain, and they refused to change for emacs. evil-mode didn't exist yet, so I settled on using viper (an older vi-like mode) and any time my muscle-memory did something that didn't work, I figured out how to add that particular key binding. It was super hacky, but Worked For Me to let me use emacs for lisp dev and vim for everything else.
From then on it was all downhill; there were so many things that you could do in vim, but were harder and the vim packages tended to be less polished than the emacs packages. Neovim seemed to recognize some of the issues with extending vim, but (at the time) was really a terminal-first editor. Now that I could switch between the two without my fingers complaining, when something was better on emacs, I added that to my "list of things I do with emacs."
Eventually most of what I do is in emacs rather than vim, and I reach for emacs first. I had to engrave some music for my son the other day; I've used lilypond (kind of LaTeX for music) in the past so I decided to try it with emacs. Turns out lilypond ships with an emacs mode that does all the basic things, plus registers a command for running lilypond on the current buffer. Tile my pdf viewer next to emacs and I can see the results with a single command.
I can (and have) set up a similar thing with vim, but the community around emacs seems to really take seriously that emacs is more of a gui toolkit with really good text support, while the parts of vim community is suspicious of any significant new functionality to vim that isn't specifically about editing text.