I feel similarly to this. Emacs got extensibility down and probably would have destroyed Vi. Vim added Vimscript, but it is not what most would call elegant, nice, or any of the other things we want in a language. Adding extensibility is what kept Vim around.

I like the design of Emacs, and I also like Lisps in general, but the Vim editing model is the best for me.

It looks like Neovim is going to address many of the issues with Vim.

As an emacs fan, I find vim model simple, abstract and efficient. Emacs default paradigm has amazing foundations but give fingercuts too often and lack composability while vim is quite self consistent (how ironic giving lisp essence).

That said, growing your editing system by evaluation a small function is still a bliss. Go lisps.

#repant

That's a very good way to put it.

Vim's editing model is much more functional (a la functional programming) than Emacs', whereas the latter's foundation is much more functional.

I keep thinking I should try Emacs with one of the Vim-ulators, but I've got a pretty good flow going in Vim and I've got a lot of other things I'm trying to learn right now, not to mention paying work to do.

Me too, since many people report emacs evil mode being pretty polished by now, I'm tempted to try a fresh emacs setup. There's also lispy.el, which is IIUC a paredit superset in vi-command-clothing.

Although me too comments are not encouraged on HN, I've got to add a "Me too" to your "Me too". I used Emacs for 20 years and on a whim decided to learn Vim. Once I got the hang of it (telling the editor what I want to do rather than moving the cursor all over the place), I couldn't go back to Emacs. I've tried Evil a couple of times a few years ago and it just didn't work for anything other than superficial commands. The reports I'm reading in this thread are making me very, very excited to try it again!

Who knows, with the functional trends, and the work on guile emacs, maybe there will be a window for an emacs sibling with simpler core and combinator-like interactions.

vi objects feels a lot like lazy partial application with sane defaults: effect <| (move or stay) <| (count or 1)

It's not for Vim anymore but can adapt to many editing styles.

FWIW, I use Sublime/Jetbrain products for most of my programming and I always turn on vim keybindings. It isn't 100% the same as actual vim, but it is still faster than a mouse for me.

I've never got into any of these Vi/Vim emulators because they vary from pure Vim in subtly unexpected ways and typically don't support plugins or vimrc setup. Neovim will change all that, being based on direct socket-based communication with actual Vim, so it really will be possible to get the best of both worlds.

ideavim is easily the best vim emulation I had ever used until I tried spacemacs/evil. Ideavim blew the eclipse vim modes out of the water

And they fixed some annoying inconsistencies with recent releases. It's pretty good now. Makes developing Java in an IDE tolerable.

Personally I enjoy any editor that doesn't get in my way, I really want to learn Emacs and / or Vim, but it's not exactly a downhill experience as say Notepad++, Atom, and other editors. I enjoy the idea of having all the Emacs or Vim super powers, but I can't seem to get used to it, I either use nano while on the terminal or just a full on IDE.

Part of the foundation of understanding and appreciating text editors is understanding and appreciating the value of text, rather than trying to abstract it away under an IDE's several layers of GUI controls, widgets, and platform-specific APIs often designed by a single company that's trying to convince you to lock the future of your career and/or company to its platform.

Furthermore, neither emacs nor vim are hard to learn. There's a widespread myth perpetuated both by novices and elitists that it's an all or nothing kind of thing. The reality is that even in vim you can use arrow keys and mouse/trackpad scrolling and ignore hjkl if you want. You could, for example, use terminal vim every single day and use only about 5.5 vim-specific commands: i, ctrl-c, :w, :q / :q!, and ZZ. With gvim or macvim, you could reduce that to two: i and ctrl-c.

Learning vim is like learning Kung Fu, you practice the same awkward route motions until they're so natural that you don't even notice you're doing them. Sadly, it's not a quick process, but it's worth it.

It's true. It made me develop an automatic reflex to hit the Esc key every time after inserting a couple of characters, even when I wasn't using vi at all. It was pretty annoying. Imagine typing a document in Word and pressing Esc constantly. Fortunately I switched to Emacs and the reflex went away.

But don't you find yourself hitting C-a to go to the beginning of a line and then insert a line break, then inadvertently deleting everything on the page. As an Emacs user, I do this all the time.

One nice thing about OSX is that some emacs movements work in most programs.

C-a, C-e, C-n, C-p, C-k, C-y (kill yank not quite the same)

Edit: C-f and C-b too

Edit 2: Just checked and word is not one of these programs :(

Here's a link to add Emacs keybindings to Word on Mac OS X. Hopefully it's still accurate.

http://emacsblog.org/2007/02/18/emacs-key-bindings-in-ms-wor...

It's faster than you'd think. I was far better with Vim than Textmate within a month of my switch.

Not to take away from the rest of your comment, but Macvim in insert mode works exactly like any other Mac text entry program. All of your regular keyboard shortcuts work as you expect them to, as does the mouse.