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From Vim to Emacs in fourteen days (2015)

by Assossa on 3/11/21, 11:47 AM with 175 comments

  • by dang on 3/11/21, 9:03 PM

    Just for fun, here are some of the larger past threads. Others?

    After over a decade of Vim, I’m hooked on Emacs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16551796 - March 2018 (161 comments)

    A pragmatic decision on GNU Emacs versus Vim for programming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13590944 - Feb 2017 (59 comments)

    Why I switched from Vim to Emacs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13130775 - Dec 2016 (101 comments)

    From Vim to Emacs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8367384 - Sept 2014 (116 comments)

    Emacs and Vim - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8084359 - July 2014 (275 comments)

    Vi and Vim vs. Emacs Shootout and Deal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3205828 - Nov 2011 (52 comments)

    Some thoughts on Emacs and Vim - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2229040 - Feb 2011 (40 comments)

    How a Vim user converts to Emacs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2036586 - Dec 2010 (66 comments)

    On vim vs emacs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1374916 - May 2010 (28 comments)

    Debian's Vim maintainer switches to Emacs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=341492 - Oct 2008 (32 comments)

  • by salmo on 3/11/21, 11:01 PM

    In college I used Emacs, because I had a romance with lisps and just really enjoyed extending stuff. Also used Sawfish as my window manager, etc. The modal thing in vi(m) was hard for me to wrap my head around and the bizarre config of vim seemed so inelegant.

    But when I got a gig as a sysadmin running a few thousand servers w/ a slew of Unixes (Solaris, BSD, HP-UX, Linux) I finally bit the bullet and learned vi, because it was the only common denominator (oh, man and ksh88 because so many bash-es were so broken on those platforms).

    Now I find modal editing very natural and productive and don't miss the keyboard gymnastics of emacs. I find I get pissed at every text editor that isn't vi. Outlook, this text box, etc.

    I use IntelliJ (and do Python and Go in it) with vi binding for large long-lived projects and just vim/neovim in a terminal for scripts, short-lived stuff, and quick edits. The bindings in IntelliJ are good enough, although sometimes I forget and try to do things, like run a file through awk.

    I play with using VSCode with vi bindings from time to time, but honestly just forget to use it much.

    I have a smallish vim config with a handful of plugins, mostly for linting. I'm comfortable with it and haven't ever really found it lacking. And I don't feel the need to maintain a codebase for my config like I enjoyed doing in college. I guess I garden in my garden vs my config files and am not so focused on some kind of concept of purity. Heck, I think I have the default background on my mac.

  • by andrewzah on 3/11/21, 9:48 PM

    This article fails to explain -why- one would want to switch to emacs from vim.

    Org-mode and configuring emacs in a lisp-like are cool, but are not worth re-learning everything for me. I put that time in already by reading "Practical Vim" by Drew Neil and other vim literature online. I'm sure everyone is already aware, but vi is available basically everywhere. This has saved my ass at least twice where I couldn't access vim or had internet access to install XYZ editor.

    So as a power vim user I see no reason to switch. If I can't use vim, most editors now have support for reasonable vim bindings. So I use that for Jetbrains' products / Joplin / Insomnia / etc.

  • by drums8787 on 3/11/21, 11:45 PM

    I went in the other direction about 5 years ago after 20 years of always installing Emacs on every computer I ever used. Vim has had a much bigger impact on my productivity.

    Partly because of excellent plugins (VSCode, Visual Studio), partly because, for some reason I bothered to learn Vim shortcuts to degree I never did with Emacs. And I just love that vi and vim is quick and available on my various cloud servers.

    Once in a while I toy with the idea of going back and using evil mode (I keep reading about org mode).

  • by gspr on 3/12/21, 9:24 AM

    Tangentially related: I've used emacs for coding for a decade, and for email for a few years. I love it. But I'm missing out on its arguably strongest feature: elisp! My config file is a tragedy of stuff I hamfistedly cobbled together. I'd like to learn this skill properly, and thus conquer the world (I assume this makes me able to).

    Can anyone recommend a resource? I speak some C-like languages, and Python and Haskell, but no LISP at all. I'm an emacs user, but have only superficial knowledge of how emacs actually works.

  • by loloquwowndueo on 3/12/21, 12:41 AM

    It probably took me longer than 14 days to learn vim after using emacs for years, it was worth it - mainly and specifically I switched because vim’s modal nature means fewer finger contortions to reach 6 modifier keys simultaneously as required with emacs - that was giving me RSI symptoms. I’ve been happy with vim since and it tends to be more easily available in remote systems. To each their own though - both editors are ok :)

  • by hirundo on 3/11/21, 9:19 PM

    > If, like me, you’re curious enough to give Emacs a try...

    So curiosity rather than conversion. Six year later is he still using Emacs? Went back to Vim? Moved on to something else?

    I have enough years invested in muscle memory of Vim itself and various plugins that what curiosity I have about Emacs is well controlled. I doubt I have runway left to get to the same productivity in another editor.

  • by sigmonsays on 3/11/21, 9:26 PM

    I went from vim to emacs for development in go and python. I Went with doom emacs, which is a configuration distribution already prebuilt which is friendly to vimm users (ie, evil mode). It was rough at first, required writing lots of cheat sheets and also changing workflows a little. I feel much more productive in emacs than vim. IMHO, its more straightforward to google "How to do X in emacs" than "how to do X in vim" and actually end up with a productive configuration change.

  • by maximilianroos on 3/11/21, 10:15 PM

    For those who use Vim bindings, and would like to try out emacs, I'd suggest trying Spacemacs:

    https://www.spacemacs.org/

    It has "evil mode" by default — the vim bindings.

    I picked this up at Jane Street, where much of the internal tooling is in emacs. I still use it wherever I can't get a good vscode setup, and it has some advantages over vscode.

  • by jhbadger on 3/12/21, 4:00 AM

    Am I the only person who uses Lem? An Emacs-clone written and extended in Common Lisp rather than the weird version of Lisp Emacs uses.

    https://github.com/lem-project/lem

  • by bogwog on 3/11/21, 10:09 PM

    Vim is my go-to terminal-based text editor, and I used it for a decent amount of time, but when I finally decided to switch to something like Sublime Text, I never felt the need to go back.

    Maybe it's because I'm not a "touch typist" who uses a home row and all that stuff, so the keybindings optimized for that don't really help me that much.

    I do like Vim though, and it's an insanely useful skill to have because I can SSH into any server and edit config files like if I were straight up programming.

  • by dfox on 3/12/21, 1:03 AM

    Well I'm long time emacs user who switche to emacs from vi(m) in essentially the time it took to go through the C-h t tutorial.

    While today I dont't use Emacs as the day-to-day editor (I use VSCode, for a bunch of not entirely good reasons that mostly have to do with macOS) I think that exposing people new to unix to emacs/zile makes more sense than to vi(m). And then there is the "every mac textfield understands default emacs key bindings" effect...

  • by monoideism on 3/11/21, 11:15 PM

    I've tried to get into emacs, VS Code, and Sublime (all w/Vi keybindings, of course), but I always seem to find myself back in Vim (or Neovim).

  • by afarviral on 3/12/21, 7:14 PM

    I want to love emacs with default bindings but find them unergonomic to the extreme. However I think VIMs bindings and multimodal text editing is a false economy, so I don't want to just use evil-mode (spacemacs or DOOM). In other IDEs and OSs there is a consistent scheme for copy, paste, undo, redo but no consistent scheme for new-line-above/below or movement near the home row keys using modifiers. I've been experimenting with alt+[some homerow keys] for movement and left-hand w/modifiers for changes similar to ergoemacs, in vscode. The realisation I've had is that there is an absence of standardized keybindings for text editing across IDEs/editors and the complexity and lack of interoperability rolling-your-own make that approach universally avoided. This means we are in a rut going back and forth between emacs and vim and OS keybindings, and the editor wars are just a symptom of a greater problem. The real issue is that there is not enough R&D on efficiency and human-oriented design and/or this hasn't influenced current standards to a great enough degree. Aside from in a terminal I'm not convinced (if timed/tested) the average coder using the mouse heavily with left-hand shortcuts would be any less capable than a vim guru. Accuracy with a mouse is something that can be improved too, just look at competitive FPS games. I'd also posit the mouse coder spent more time learning coding and less time fiddling with his tools.

    Does anyone know where I could find more info about this stuff?

    Does anyone know of any research comparing the efficiency/speed/stress of VIM users to, say, VS Code keybindings or emacs ones?

    I am a productive vim user already and have just learned standard emacs bindings and ergoemacs bindings within a few hours. This is not a matter of a vim-naiive person avoiding learning the tool. I do have a preoccupation with tools rather than getting stuff done with them... That's our curse isn't it?

  • by iLemming on 3/14/21, 5:15 PM

    Here we go again. Vim vs. Emacs. A decades-old argument that actually doesn't have any merits.

    Because Vim and Emacs are two distinct categories. The only thing that makes them similar is that they are both based on something. That something is an idea. And not just an ordinary, everyday concept, but an influential, holy grail type of thing.

    Vi and the concept of the modality is an incredible, powerful, fantastic model. People who never hardheartedly tried to learn Vi-model just don't get to say anything about it. Can you respect an opinion about CRISPR coming from someone who has no clue about polynucleotide chains and DNA?

    Yes, Vim is not overly intuitive for a complete beginner. Like many, perhaps most awesome tools, it too has a certain level of sophistication. You cannot enter the Suez or Panama Canal gates' control room and suggest removing all those knobs, switches, buttons, etc., and instead, install one colossal touch screen because that would be "a much more intuitive interface".

    Vim is hard to learn, but you see, there's usually a strong correlation between something that's not so easy to acquire and simplicity gained later. Conversely, things that are easy to pick up, very often later become cumbersome and annoyingly counter-productive. Rich Hickey's "Simple Made Easy" rhetoric very nicely manifests that.

    So yes, Vi-model is an incredible idea. Vim, Neovim, Evil, etc., are just implementations of that idea.

    Now, Emacs is based on another mind-blowing idea. The idea of practical notation for lambda calculus, what is known as Lisp. Lisp, probably can be crowned as the most important idea in computer science. It's just hard to think of something more influential than Lisp. Emacs is just a practical implementation (and frankly, not the best one) of that idea.

    Arguing what's better - Emacs or Vim is like debating what was more important in the history of health care - the invention of anesthesia or discovery of penicillin.

    Both Vim and Emacs are awesome, and one is not better than another. If you can't see that - then probably there's a big hole in your understanding of at least one of the ideas they are based on.

  • by arunc on 3/12/21, 6:31 AM

    20 years of vim user here. I learnt Emacs for just one thing. Magit!

    Except that I don't have any other use for Emacs.

  • by jhchabran on 3/12/21, 11:56 AM

    If anyone wants to give a try, it's worth noting a few things if you come from vim:

    - if you are on osx, you'll may find the gui rendering quite laggy if you are using a Retina display. Using the terminal will make it snappy again. Using something like Alacritty will make it even snappier if you're sensitive to it.

    - if you are on linux and use the gui, the pgtk branch is worth giving a try, it drops the old extremely outdated Xt code

    - LSP can be quite resource hungry, it's really worth giving a try to the nativecomp branch of emacs 28. https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GccEmacs

  • by mkl95 on 3/11/21, 9:50 PM

    I have been using Emacs for several years now, I love how easy it makes it to quickly browse and edit code. The only downside is that coding without Emacs keybindings makes me uncomfortable and kind of sloppy. Fortunately most IDEs have an Emacs plugin.

  • by da39a3ee on 3/12/21, 3:50 AM

    I love emacs as a lisp environment to work in and have used it for 20 years but the emacs LSP picture is starting to look seriously sketchy in comparison with what more language-specific IDEs such as VSCode and PyCharm etc offer. Especially now that static typing is becoming standard in languages like Python and Javascript. If you have a lot of spare time you can probably make eglot and lsp-mode work in your favorite language. But if you work in a few languages, you sort of need to be working part time and have no family or social commitments.

  • by mrbonner on 3/12/21, 1:43 AM

    Does it feel weird that you have to enable Evil mode to use emacs? I have been using Vim for most my life and switched to emacs last years. I am using vanilla version with lots of plugins of course.

  • by mjfl on 3/11/21, 9:35 PM

    I started with emacs and never learned vim. What am I missing?

  • by yudlejoza on 3/11/21, 11:57 PM

    If you switched from vim to evil-on-emacs, you didn't really switch to emacs. You switched to something akin to a best-of-both-worlds.

  • by tyingq on 3/11/21, 9:22 PM

    "Finally, install evil-mode, the Vim emulation package for Emacs"

    Anyone use this regularly? Does it kill off some of the upside of emacs?

  • by hannofcart on 3/12/21, 7:57 AM

    Recently, I too tried making the switch from vim to Emacs via the Spacemacs route. The effort didn't last long. I found that Spacemacs, without installing any extra "layers" than what comes out of the box, consumes too much RAM. Over 1GB of it. Don't know if this was expected or if it was something specific to just my machine.

  • by alfiedotwtf on 3/11/21, 9:28 PM

    I’m curious to hear from folks who have switched between the two, and have lasted for more than a year on both. If you’ve learned more than the basics and both became muscle memory, which did you end up sticking to?

    (Vim user for 23 years, Emacs user of none... but interested because of Lisp)

  • by fhunt on 3/12/21, 7:29 AM

  • by efiecho on 3/11/21, 9:47 PM

    Emacs is a great OS but it lacks a decent text editor.

  • by every on 3/11/21, 9:56 PM

    From Vim or Emacs to Nano in fourteen minutes...

  • by keithnz on 3/11/21, 10:20 PM

    wouldn't this just be....

    How to go from Vim to any other Editor/IDE and use Vim bindings ...

  • by simonblack on 3/12/21, 12:39 AM

    What is this new-fangled Emacs??

    WordStar ought to be enough for anybody!

  • by squid_demon on 3/12/21, 3:24 AM

    Probably took 12 of those 14 days to just get Emacs loaded. Just saying.