Announcing my free book on Vim

http://www.swaroopch.com/blog/a-free-book-on-vim/

by prakash • 18 years ago

101 27 18 years ago

swaroopch.com

tzury• 18 years ago

Just started reading it.

So far great reading.

Thank you very much

prakash• 18 years ago

Swaroop's byte of python book is well liked by beginners.

trominos• 18 years ago

Seems great.

Are there any similarly gentle intros to emacs?

davidw• 18 years ago

    M-x help-with-tutorial

silentbicycle5• 18 years ago

Which is Emacs keyboard shorthand for, "press Alt-x, let go of Alt, then type help-with-tutorial and press Enter".

If that doesn't work (depending on what Emacs thinks your Alt key is), you can also type Control-H, let go of Control, and then type t.

babo2• 18 years ago

:help Just to mention the same for Vim. :-)

d0mine• 18 years ago

I'd say press F1 F1 and follow instructions on the screen.

andr• 18 years ago

Clearly better than Emacs! (j/k)

dimitar• 18 years ago

Vim seems to add a lot of things you would rather expect from emacs (great extensibility) and emacs of course has always been able to emulate vi keybindings.

What are the major differences in functionality between the two?

jackowayed• 18 years ago

What I really like about emacs is extensibility in Lisp. I used vim until I wanted to be able to hack my editor. I have absolutely no desire to learn vimscript, a language useful solely for hacking vim. Lisp, on the other hand, is actually a real language.

andyn• 18 years ago

You can script Vim in python.

cschneid• 18 years ago

Even with all it's features, Vim's direction has always been as a pure text editor. Plugins focus on making editing better, new features help with multiple windows, making modes easier, etc.

Emacs is really a platform who's main use is a text editor. The programming tools are stronger, and it has a few more interactive options when making extensions. This allows developers to create news readers, email clients, web browsers all inside emacs. Much of that could potentially be possible in Vim, but it would require shelling out, and would have a nasty interface in general.

kingkongrevenge• 18 years ago

> The programming tools are stronger

Not really. Not outside of lisp. Vim makes for a fully capable ide.

> allows developers to create news readers, email clients, web browsers

And they're all silly wasted effort.

silentbicycle5• 18 years ago

Longer comment about same: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=230990

Emacs is a Lisp virtual machine, and tends to act more like an integrated environment, while vi(m) is a text editor with less intrinsic extensibility.

Also, Emacs's default keybindings (both in the main system and virtually every mode people write for it, out of tradition) tend to use quite a bit of modifier keys (e.g. you are frequently typing with control held down), which can be hard on your hands. Vi clearly wins in this regard.

graywh2• 18 years ago

The key thing being Vim's "modes". Vim users spend most of their time in normal mode navigating and doing some editing. Insert mode is for actually typing characters into the document.

kaens2• 18 years ago

Pretty much the first thing I do these days is swap Caps Lock and Control on my keyboard layout. Emacs is the reason I started doing this, now I wonder how I ever lived without it.

tdavis• 18 years ago

How convenient, considering I am returning to Vim after a very long absence!

Step 1: Start reading online.

Step 2: Buy it because releasing books for free is friendly.

kaens2• 18 years ago

I use emacs, and won't be switching to Vim anytime soon, but I'd like to say thanks for writing what seems like a really good book and releasing it for free.

The world needs more of this.

Announcing my free book on Vim

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