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posed | 2 years ago

I’ve been using vim for 3-4 years now, and I’m very comfortable in the vim ecosystem. Trying out emacs has been in my mind for a while, but I’m not sure if it’s worth the time investment.

discuss

order

jmkr|2 years ago

I used (and use) vim for over a decade.

I've used emacs for probably over a year now.

I'm glad I learned modal editing with vim, but with doom emacs there is nothing I miss from vim, except maybe `ctrl-p`, `projectile` isn't as good in certain cases, but it's good enough.

In my opinion emacs is just better for everything, and if you know vim well enough doom will take 10 minutes to learn to use. Those 10 minutes are the install. Most vim commands will _just work_.

phazy|2 years ago

I‘ve also been using vim for ~3yrs now, editing small programming projects and all kinds of text in it (like config files). Never had a need for emacs until a couple weeks ago I started working at a project involving a lot of meetings and writing a TeX report. I experienced that emacs, used in the auctex and org modes, is helping me a lot with that because the available commands simplify the workflow (like `reftex-citation`).

Why has trying out emacs been on your mind, if I may ask? If it‘s just for fun, go ahead. If it‘s because you think aspects of your workflow could be optimized, take a look at the several modes emacs has to offer. Otherwise, I would just stay with vim, tbh.

chungy|2 years ago

Once you go Emacs, you never go back.

chongli|2 years ago

I started on vim. Switched to emacs for a couple years, then switched back.

The biggest issue with emacs for me is ergonomic. It relies way too much on the pinkie finger for everything and it gets really painful when you get RSI in your pinkie. It’s fine if you’re going slow and taking your time with things, but then why learn a complicated editor in the first place if you’re just going to go slow?

Yes, I tried evil mode for a while as well. The problem with that is that it’s, well, evil. An unholy alliance of drastically different paradigms, the setup just becomes way too complicated. You lose the main advantage of emacs modelessness and are back to switching modes like vim, only now you also have all of the emacs key bindings to deal with. Why not just go back to vim and simplify your life? That’s what I did!

sph|2 years ago

I moved to emacs (with its own keybindings) after using vim for a decade.

Learning something new and very different to what you are used to is always worth the time investment. It doesn't mean you have to necessarily leave vim.

fsociety|2 years ago

Start with Doom Emacs, you get sensible defaults out of the box and familiar vim bindings, but with all the emacs goodness

ithrow|2 years ago

You can just use it for note taking and as an outliner (orgmode) and keep using vim for programming.