> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50402666 ... hmm explain?
And the LLM tried for a bit (mostly things I know), and then concluded:
> And the original commenter never actually explains what Emacs does better. When challenged, they get defensive rather than providing examples. So we're interpreting a provocative claim, not a demonstrated advantage.
I found that very enlightening! Thank you for your suggestion to ask an LLM!
That's exactly why I didn't take your bait. You already know the reasons for my statement; you simply choose to ignore them. That's fine, Neovim is an excellent text editor, perhaps the best modal editor out there. For me, the idea of vim modality, a brilliant, practical, beautiful model, has more value as an abstraction rather than as a concrete implementation. It's a magnificent idea, and ideas do port.
For years, my every single choice of a tool that had anything to do with text composition got paired with vim modality; every IDE, every editor, terminal, browser, WM invariably went with it. It's been years since it stopped being just an instrument of ergonomics, productivity, faster typing - it became my identity. Just like a left-handed person can't contemplate one day becoming different, I have zero practical, emotional or whatever reasons to stop being a vimmer.
Gary Bernhardt (the wat javascript guy) once said, "There's no vim-mode, there's only Vim," meaning that not a single vim emulation has ever gotten to the point of not having glaring, annoying deficiencies. I've used vim-motions in Sublime, Atom, IntelliJ, VSCode, Chrome, Firefox, Brave - not a single extension gets it to the point where it starts feeling natural.
I had to agree with Gary until the day I found Evil-mode in Emacs. It is surprisingly good. It is so good that you forget - it is not a built-in feature of Emacs. And when you understand the sheer amount of effort required to get vim modality right, you just can't remain unimpressed. And Evil-mode is such a small chunk of what Emacs is about; it's not even the tip of the tip of the iceberg. If there were a jet plane that could perform a perfect vertical landing and yet almost never had to use or even advertise that feature, it would still amaze you as a masterpiece of engineering.
That's where you might realize that Emacs isn't a mere text editor, it's a darn text orchestrator - it doesn't only focus on text composition, it also shifts the attention to valuing text consumption. The grand idea behind a Lisp REPL with a built-in text editor is a magnificent abstraction. Anyone who tries to compare Emacs with any other IDE or text editor would miss the point; it's a categorical error to even attempt to do that.