Emacs is Dead (2010)

Re:Emacs is Dead (2010) by regularfry on Monday June 03, 2013 @10:02AM (#5813310)

Try this task for an example: underline an arbitrary line of text with '=' characters. In vim that's 11 keypresses across 3 operations, possibly less if there's a shortcut I haven't thought of. How many keypresses does emacs take out of the box?

Emacs, especially with paredit, is fairly well optimised for editing s-expressions and the like. Vim is very well optimised for line-based editing, but I don't get on with its buffer management at all.

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Re:Emacs is Dead (2010) by intractable on Monday June 03, 2013 @12:01PM (#5813999)

    > underline an arbitrary line of text with '=' characters. In vim that's 11 keypresses across 3 operations

Sounds like a vimgolf challenge to me. Here's my entry:

YpVr=

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Re:Emacs is Dead (2010) by swah on Monday June 03, 2013 @04:59PM (#5815984)

I'm wondering now that the creativity to come up with those things might actually be beneficial to coding.

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Re:Emacs is Dead (2010) by danielbarla on Tuesday June 04, 2013 @02:24AM (#5818002)

I'd agree with that, and also - an intense dislike of unnecessary repetition / work is definitely a good thing. I'm not sure using Vim causes that, but it definitely reinforces it.

For those that are interested, I would recommend "Practical Vim", and it includes many examples (including the above one) which really accelerate the learning process:

http://pragprog.com/book/dnvim/practical-vim

There are definitely cheaper alternatives (including free ones), but this book really laid the concepts out very clearly for me.

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Re:Emacs is Dead (2010) by regularfry on Wednesday June 05, 2013 @07:03AM (#5824759)

Well, that Vr= soundly beats my :s/./=/g.

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