I've found this handy for when you are generating HTML manuals from text comments in the source code, and you want to include a quick-n-dirty diagram in your manual.
Slightly off topic: I've recently gotten to the point where I feel comfortable and productive in Vim. I know emacs is worth the effort to learn if you're replacing most editors out there. But does anyone have any opinions on whether it's worth the effort if the editor you'd be replacing is Vim?
It really depends on what type of vim user you are. I used vi/m for 10 years before starting with emacs. Emacs works better for me. I know people for whom vim works better for them. It would be a shame not to find out for yourself.
As an Emacs user, my answer is no. Choose your path and become proficient in it. Unless you have ample time, you may run the risk of becoming a Jack of All Trades, Master of None.
Emacs is not an editor, it's an Emacs Lisp interpreter, so you can't really compare it to Vim.
If you just need an editor which is configurable no more than deemed necessary, Vim is fine. If you need more than that, Emacs is your piece of cake.
Emacs allows you to grow your own environment, which does things exactly as you wish. For instance, I've read that in Vim you can't customize where a sentence starts or ends for movement commands. Of course, in Emacs you could do that. Emacs' advantages are those shared by all Lisp environments.
Another - already mentioned - killer feature of Emacs is the ability of Emacs Lisp to talk to external processes.
This quote by Larry Clapp about him abandoning the development of a SLIME-like environment for Vim sums up the issues: "The more I worked on slim-vim, and the more I looked at Vim internals, the more I didn't like it, and the more I felt like I was just reinventing Emacs."(http://www.lispniks.com/pipermail/slim-vim/2007-May/000555.h...)
As a regular vim user who explored the emacs world for a while, I have somewhat mixed advice.
emacs is worth learning. It highlights certain features, almost all of which you can pretty much get in vim -- it is just a different focus. One feature you do NOT have in vim is the ability to smoothly run a subprocess within the editor. That is why vimmers like to call emacs an OS; however, despite the ridicule, there really is something different about the SLIME experience that you ought to feel. There has been a lot of work on emacs to make it integrate in neat graphical ways.
However, if you are fairly competent in vim, emacs is not worth using regularly for editing anything that has to do with text. The biggest issue is that to make emacs usable, you have to remap just about everything. It is almost as if its designers did everything in their power to stop people from editing text. For example (and there are many), vim folks make their lives quickly easier by using (book)marks and macros; compare the key combos for these in vim to the ones in emacs, and you will see one reason why emacs editing is, by default, slower.
I avoid remapping keys because I actually work with other people sometimes within their environment, and it helps if the keys do the same thing. This makes for an unfortunate need for me to NOT get used to dvorak. :(
There are other nitpicks, such as the inability to edit/view large files (before some naysayer shows up again to ask what large files we might edit: genome files and log files come to mind).
Also, if you are told to try viper mode (and then told subsequently to use vimpulse.el with it -- definitely do this if you are using viper), these are good suggestions to get a fraction of vim's functionality along with some minor but annoying differences. Again, I point you towards macros. But also note that as soon as, for any reason, you open another buffer (for help, for an error, for giggles), you are in emacs keys world again and not in viper, so you will not be able to do your beloved Ctrl-W Ctrl-W immediately. If you are going to try emacs, just use the emacs bindings and forget about viper/vimpulse.
One advantage suggested by emacs folks is the configurability of the editor with elisp. It is true that it is very configurable. You will find, however, that some of the difference is marketing and FUD; vimscript is a rather powerful little language worth learning in its own right. Most people do not realize that vimscript has OOP. And elisp does not teach you Lisp that you can use outside emacs... just Lispy concepts.
All that said, I am not such a hardcore vimmer that I have a "set -i vi" configuration in bash. Learning emacs helped me learn how to do edits faster on the commandline. With dual experience in these editors, I sometimes use the wrong keys (try to move forward a word with Alt-F). Fortunately, in vim, undo is just a "u" away.
Try it out. Let me know if you come away with the same experience or find ways to make it reasonably tolerable.
Vim modal keys will always be more effective (and less painfull) to just edit raw text.
Emacs will always be more extensive because elisp, with all its problems, does great there. I also prefer how Emacs handle multiple buffers too (even with Vim's project plugins).
That said, I'm trying to use Textmate now. I think Emacs is what fucked up my left wrist.
I used Vim exclusively in the past, and as an exercise in curiosity and experimentation with Lisp' I dabbled with Emacs. Somehow, during the process of learning emacs, I gradually abandoned Vim and am using Emacs almost exclusively now (throw in odd IDE like VS and Eclipse here and there). I hadn't even realized I switched Vim for Emacs, it just happened.
I can't say I am more productive or anything with it. Probably the thing that took me away into it is that real process of learning Emacs is not actually learning any given set of commands (well, that happens too, of course), but it's more about starting to customize your own Emacs.
During that customization process, Emacs grew into something I'd use if I were to build one myself - and, to an extent, I built one myself by customizing it. So, it's like a bio-suit, it's an amorphous mass that grows around to fit you almost perfectly as you tap into it's powers.
Emacs is not just a text editor, its more like a text editing platform or framework, or something like that. Emacs is literally the lisp of the text editor world, if you have the time and patience you should learn it even if you won't use it much, for the so called enlightenment it will offer you.
You can be up and running in Emacs in a few minutes, if you grab AquaEmacs. It uses the Mac keybindings. Cmd-w, Cmd-s,Cmd-o, Cmd-c,Cmd-x,Cmd-v, etc. Just like any Mac program, navigate the menus to see what features and keybindings are available, when you get the urge.
Very cool. In Emacs.app (aka. Carbon Emacs) my right click acts as an eraser and does not show a menu like it does in the video. Does anybody know how to enable that popup menu (I am a vim user and a emacs noob.)
Vanilla windows install, same problem here. C-h m will show the documentation for the minor mode, there should be keyboard commands for everything, I'll need to spend some time on this, it looks great...
I use the lightweight emacs alternative 'zile' a lot, I have it installed on both my desktop machines (alongside emacs) and also on some tiny machines like OpenWRT routers where I don't want an emacs install.
It loads totally instantly whereas my emacs configuration is ~0.5s, so if I'm really just jumping into a file for something very simple and then out again, I use that.
One step up in complexity is to alias something as 'emacs -nw' (emacs start in console mode.) Which is almost as quick (depending on your startup files), but you've got all your nice custom .emacs configuration there.
Then, there's the fact you can run emacs in server mode and then your emacs editor windows are just connecting back to a server process and not loading up anything at all.
Finally, there's the fact that a true emacs user would already be interacting with their shell in emacs shell-mode, so they wouldn't need to load anything at all.
Traditionally one has a single, long running Emacs process that you do everything in, even quick edits. If you had to wait for it to start up from scratch then yeah, that would be pretty annoying.
My fingers frequently go `sudo vi ...' because I'm not used to using the sudo mode in TRAMP, but that would arguably be my deficiency, not Emacs.
I used to use vim for coding before switching to Emacs (well, TextMate and then Emacs). I still use vim for editing on remote machines and quick local edits. There certainly are people who edit everything in Emacs though, I'm just not one of them.
The takeaway for me (since I use Emacs in a console and not in GUI mode) is `C-x n n` and `C-x n w`. Looks like it could be pretty useful for `M-x replace-regexp` (if I don't want to use query-replace-regexp, and I've got a lot of searching and replacing to do in a particular region.
indeed. When you want to do a quick and dirty 'replace-string', this command looks very good. I've ended up copying the whole region to scratch to make my edits more than once.
[+] [-] vault_|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] batterseapower|15 years ago|reply
I've found this handy for when you are generating HTML manuals from text comments in the source code, and you want to include a quick-n-dirty diagram in your manual.
[+] [-] rauljara|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jjames|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcsalterego|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lelele|15 years ago|reply
If you just need an editor which is configurable no more than deemed necessary, Vim is fine. If you need more than that, Emacs is your piece of cake.
Emacs allows you to grow your own environment, which does things exactly as you wish. For instance, I've read that in Vim you can't customize where a sentence starts or ends for movement commands. Of course, in Emacs you could do that. Emacs' advantages are those shared by all Lisp environments.
Another - already mentioned - killer feature of Emacs is the ability of Emacs Lisp to talk to external processes.
This quote by Larry Clapp about him abandoning the development of a SLIME-like environment for Vim sums up the issues: "The more I worked on slim-vim, and the more I looked at Vim internals, the more I didn't like it, and the more I felt like I was just reinventing Emacs."(http://www.lispniks.com/pipermail/slim-vim/2007-May/000555.h...)
[+] [-] Xurinos|15 years ago|reply
emacs is worth learning. It highlights certain features, almost all of which you can pretty much get in vim -- it is just a different focus. One feature you do NOT have in vim is the ability to smoothly run a subprocess within the editor. That is why vimmers like to call emacs an OS; however, despite the ridicule, there really is something different about the SLIME experience that you ought to feel. There has been a lot of work on emacs to make it integrate in neat graphical ways.
However, if you are fairly competent in vim, emacs is not worth using regularly for editing anything that has to do with text. The biggest issue is that to make emacs usable, you have to remap just about everything. It is almost as if its designers did everything in their power to stop people from editing text. For example (and there are many), vim folks make their lives quickly easier by using (book)marks and macros; compare the key combos for these in vim to the ones in emacs, and you will see one reason why emacs editing is, by default, slower.
I avoid remapping keys because I actually work with other people sometimes within their environment, and it helps if the keys do the same thing. This makes for an unfortunate need for me to NOT get used to dvorak. :(
There are other nitpicks, such as the inability to edit/view large files (before some naysayer shows up again to ask what large files we might edit: genome files and log files come to mind).
Also, if you are told to try viper mode (and then told subsequently to use vimpulse.el with it -- definitely do this if you are using viper), these are good suggestions to get a fraction of vim's functionality along with some minor but annoying differences. Again, I point you towards macros. But also note that as soon as, for any reason, you open another buffer (for help, for an error, for giggles), you are in emacs keys world again and not in viper, so you will not be able to do your beloved Ctrl-W Ctrl-W immediately. If you are going to try emacs, just use the emacs bindings and forget about viper/vimpulse.
One advantage suggested by emacs folks is the configurability of the editor with elisp. It is true that it is very configurable. You will find, however, that some of the difference is marketing and FUD; vimscript is a rather powerful little language worth learning in its own right. Most people do not realize that vimscript has OOP. And elisp does not teach you Lisp that you can use outside emacs... just Lispy concepts.
All that said, I am not such a hardcore vimmer that I have a "set -i vi" configuration in bash. Learning emacs helped me learn how to do edits faster on the commandline. With dual experience in these editors, I sometimes use the wrong keys (try to move forward a word with Alt-F). Fortunately, in vim, undo is just a "u" away.
Try it out. Let me know if you come away with the same experience or find ways to make it reasonably tolerable.
[+] [-] swah|15 years ago|reply
That said, I'm trying to use Textmate now. I think Emacs is what fucked up my left wrist.
[+] [-] Keyframe|15 years ago|reply
I can't say I am more productive or anything with it. Probably the thing that took me away into it is that real process of learning Emacs is not actually learning any given set of commands (well, that happens too, of course), but it's more about starting to customize your own Emacs.
During that customization process, Emacs grew into something I'd use if I were to build one myself - and, to an extent, I built one myself by customizing it. So, it's like a bio-suit, it's an amorphous mass that grows around to fit you almost perfectly as you tap into it's powers.
[+] [-] pavelludiq|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] melling|15 years ago|reply
http://aquamacs.org/
I imagine on Windows you can find one with equivalent key-bindings.
As you get the urge to learn more, start reading blogs, etc.
Here's a good place to start:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/60367/the-single-most-use...
[+] [-] steve19|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flatline|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrislo|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ww520|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] surki|15 years ago|reply
Especially integration with Ido mode.
[+] [-] b3b0p|15 years ago|reply
When I'm setting up / configuring Linux boxes at work I always use Vim because it's always there and light weight.
I always got the impression using Emacs for this would be the equal of using Visual Studio or Eclipse.
[+] [-] angusgr|15 years ago|reply
It loads totally instantly whereas my emacs configuration is ~0.5s, so if I'm really just jumping into a file for something very simple and then out again, I use that.
One step up in complexity is to alias something as 'emacs -nw' (emacs start in console mode.) Which is almost as quick (depending on your startup files), but you've got all your nice custom .emacs configuration there.
Then, there's the fact you can run emacs in server mode and then your emacs editor windows are just connecting back to a server process and not loading up anything at all.
Finally, there's the fact that a true emacs user would already be interacting with their shell in emacs shell-mode, so they wouldn't need to load anything at all.
Zen moment
[+] [-] gchpaco|15 years ago|reply
My fingers frequently go `sudo vi ...' because I'm not used to using the sudo mode in TRAMP, but that would arguably be my deficiency, not Emacs.
[+] [-] sjs|15 years ago|reply
I used to use vim for coding before switching to Emacs (well, TextMate and then Emacs). I still use vim for editing on remote machines and quick local edits. There certainly are people who edit everything in Emacs though, I'm just not one of them.
[+] [-] jcsalterego|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s1rech|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lelele|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zokier|15 years ago|reply
(vim user, but emacs seems nicer and nicer every time I see stuff like this)
[+] [-] cag_ii|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steveeq1|15 years ago|reply