Emacs and Vim

http://www.martinklepsch.org/posts/emacs-and-vim.html

by mklappstuhl • 12 years ago

221 275 12 years ago

Yuioup2• 12 years ago

I use Vim on Windows. I tried to learn Emacs but I keep running into roadblocks because of poor Windows compatibility of plugins.

mkesper• 12 years ago

If you need them, you might consider using the Cygwin(64) version of Emacs. The "w-32" version gives best of both worlds, as it does not need an X server. Be sure to start it with a shortcut so it finds $HOME etc.:

  C:\cygwin64\bin\run.exe /usr/bin/bash.exe -l -c emacs-w32.exe

elwell5• 12 years ago

I'm currently a Windows Emacs user. I'm curious, which plugins in particular gave you trouble?

Yuioup2• 12 years ago

Ideally I wanted to set up an Emacs environment for Python development. I tried to install the plugins mentioned on this page:

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/PythonProgrammingInEmacs

Couln't get flymake and pyflakes to work. pymacs was a non-starter so I couln't use ropemacs.

I also tried CEDET, but that was an epic fail.

barrkel• 12 years ago

I use Cygwin emacs in the terminal (mintty). The experience I get from this is very close to Linux (emacs-nox in rxvt).

laichzeit04• 12 years ago

I like that he mentioned CtrlP. It's the single plugin that prevents me from switching to Emacs.

There is currently nothing in Emacs (last I played with this was 3 months ago) that is 100% equivalent to CtrlP. There are some close approximations but they're not as good the real deal. I can understand how Emacs guys won't even notice this because they've not worked with something that's better than the best they have, but for Vim guys it sucks.

mklappstuhl• 12 years ago

Agree. I'm using projectile[1] for now but that somehow messes things up with caching files so that I actually cannot search my project files. I assume that might be a fault on my side though.

Have you tried projectile? From reading the Readme this was exactly what I was looking for as a Ctrl-P replacement.

[1] https://github.com/bbatsov/projectile

mziulu• 12 years ago

I've had some weird things happen too when searching for files in a project using projectile, I fix it by triggering a refresh of the cache by prefixing with a C-u the C-c p f command.

austintaylor• 12 years ago

I use projectile with caching turned off with flx-ido for sorting. I heavily favor (projectile-find-buffer) once I get going since loading the whole tree is pretty slow on a large project. I'm way more happy with this setup than I was with CtrlP.

kasey_junk• 12 years ago

I've actually started preferring the unite plugin over CtrlP even.

phaer4• 12 years ago

Could you elaborate on the features you are missing from ido-mode and helm?

Attic• 12 years ago

I used Vim before switching to Emacs, and also used CtrlP. I've also had the pain of not being able to find a good replacement for CtrlP until I discovered Helm and more specific Helm-ls-git https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm-ls-git . Now I have the opposite problem that Vim doesn't have anything as good as the collection of Helm plugins that I use.

tuhdo5• 12 years ago

Because something much better than CtrlP exists: http://tuhdo.github.io/helm-intro.html

Demo: I can search my desired file in linux kernel source with more than 40k files in an instant: http://tuhdo.github.io/helm-intro.html#sec-28

If you want to find the equivalent, use ido + flx + vertical-ido.

asuffield3• 12 years ago

Gah, the tutorial keybindings! They are mad. I've been using emacs for a very long time, and I can't imagine using those to navigate. Emacs has perfectly reasonable default keybindings these days, they just aren't the ones mentioned in the tutorial.

Command: move down one line

What vi uses: j

What the emacs tutorial suggests: C-n

What I use in emacs: the down arrow

bastih• 12 years ago

But that means your fingers have leave home row! :(

asuffield3• 12 years ago

Thankfully I am blessed with the ability to move my forearms.

I've heard a lot of people talk about keeping their fingers on the home row, and I more or less do that when I'm typing text like this, but for general navigation? I've sat next to a number of people who do it, and I get around my editor faster than they do. Based on this anecdotal evidence, I don't think moving my hand a short distance to reach another key is a significant speed cost.

Touche5• 12 years ago

What key do you press in Vim more often than any other? Esc! Not on the home row (although I'm sure you'll say you remap it to tab).

akg• 12 years ago

This seems to be one of those arguments where we programmers tend to optimize for the wrong problem. Sure, we may be able to input more text more comfortably with the merits of one text editor over another, but really, I think most of the time spent during programming is reading APIs, headers, other code and most importantly thinking. Typing is hardly the bottleneck.

yulaow• 12 years ago

Usually the strong defenders of emacs tell you that you must use c-n c-p c-b c-f to move because those are better and you will adapt in a short time.

Then the strongest defenders of emacs tell you that you must use whatever you want because the purpose of emacs is that the editor must adapt to you and not the opposite.

jerf3• 12 years ago

It's the vim defenders who will claim that the home key navigation is a must. Emacs advocates don't much care from what I've seen. Some of them will be roused to suggest that you learn to use searching better.

clarry2• 12 years ago

Actually I think the strongest defenders of emacs say you use C-s and the like for most navigation. Moving character-by-character is slow and inefficient, so the argument about whether C-n C-p etc. are better or worse than hjkl is irrelevant.

I have my own code editor which is more like vi than emacs, but I'm using interactive search in it.

thinkpad20• 12 years ago

I'm a fan of C-n and C-p; I often find myself using them even in Sublime Text or other editors (even in a text area on a web page). But for some reason I find C-f and C-b much more obtuse. Part of it is that in a QWERTY layout, "f" is to the left of "b", and yet "f" moves the cursor to the right. Also, assuming you press Ctrl with your left hand, "f" is more natural to use with your left hand, while "b" is a bit of an awkward reach, making it natural to use the right. This left-right switch is awkward, especially combined with the aforementioned direction reverse.

On the other hand, C-a and C-k (especially in combination with each other) and C-e are incredibly useful, and once I discovered them I immediately started using them everywhere.

mbrock2• 12 years ago

I use C-{n,p,f,b} all the time, though admittedly their placement is more convenient with Dvorak.

Though I also tend to use M-f and M-b a lot to navigate by words instead of characters.

I also often navigate by incremental search.

conistonwater2• 12 years ago

Speaking of incremental search: try ace-jump-mode, it's really good. Here is a video that shows it at work: http://emacsrocks.com/e10.html

acomjean3• 12 years ago

The nice thing about the C-{n,p,f,b,a,e} is they work on the bash shell command line by default. So learning them is actually really useful, even outside of emacs.

Touche5• 12 years ago

I use the arrow keys in both Vim and Emacs. There are enough keys to remember (most of which I forget all of the time... like paging up and down, have to look that one up every time) that I don't need another set of keys to remember. Arrow keys work just fine.

gnuvince• 12 years ago

Tell you the truth, I've used Emacs for a long time now (~10 years) and I don't know if I use the C-{n,p,f,b} or arrow keys. I'm more likely to move in larger chunks: search, move by word (M-f, M-b), line (C-a, C-e), etc. If I need to edit a word, I will kill it entirely and re-write it.

Chmouel• 12 years ago

same exactly for me, i use sometime the arrows or the other keys or c-s etc.... i don't mind the jk vim keys as well when i am in vim, either way it's all about your brain being good enough to context swift in .... context

rdtsc3• 12 years ago

... the down arrow

Why? Isn't that more inefficient because you have to move your hand off to the side. I can type 3 C-n before moving my to the right to do a single down arrow. Maybe I am just used to it by now, and forgot how hard it was when I started, but it makes complete sense to me.

cgag• 12 years ago

I can't imagine entering into this career or hobby and not bothering to learn how to edit text.

fantasticsid• 12 years ago

I usually rest my palm naturally on the control key when using emacs (yes I use my palm to press the control key), so ctrl-n becomes just n for e.g.

Yes it's hard to get started, but once you get the hang of it navigation in emacs just becomes so painless.

Also it's hard or even impossible at first to do it on laptops but trust me you will be able to do it.

tomsthumb2• 12 years ago

I use my palm to press the control key

that's the old-school Starcraft way. try mapping caps-lock to control sometime, just to see, it's such wasted real-estate. nothing beats muscle memory and years of practice though.

MarcScott• 12 years ago

I stick with the default emacs key bindings because many of them work outside of emacs. Muscle memory has me constantly using C-k to kill a line for instance, and this also works in Mac Mail and Safari.

Chattered• 12 years ago

Using the down arrow requires me to take my fingers off the home row.

Aardwolf• 12 years ago

A relevant comic:

http://hackles.org/cgi-bin/archives.pl?request=284

davidw• 12 years ago

I was reminded of this one:

https://twitter.com/tpope/status/439060962448912384

nick_riviera4• 12 years ago

Until it goes wrong or you have to delve into elisp or you get carpal tunnel...

After 20 years of switching back and forth I decided I wanted an extensible editor not a programming language with an editor built in. That's worked well for me.

I really always just want the simplest thing that will work as I need to rely on it entirely and understand how it works. If I was to use emacs, I'd probably use mg as shipped with OpenBSD.

phaer4• 12 years ago

Until it goes wrong

Why? Emacs reports errors fine in my experience and if not it includes a debugger.

or you have to delve into elisp

What's the problem with elisp? I guess its a matter of preference, but in my opinion elisp is easier to understand than vim script. Emacs includes extensive(!) documentation for it in it's base distribution. Granted, it's a dated language nowadays, but 3rd party libraries - easily installed through elpa - like dash.el and s.el make it a much more pleasant experience.

or you get carpal tunnel...

Again: Why? This article is about viper-mode which emulates vims key bindings so RSI should be exactly as likely as with vim itself. You could also adapt them to your needs, of course.

nick_riviera4• 12 years ago

Inner system effect for you that is.

I don't really want masses of extensibility but what I want is something that works out of the box, is understandable and doesn't require masses of customisation that I have to drag around with me everywhere.

On this basis using viper with Emacs is as illogical as using vsvim with visual studio. One should use vim (or vi which I'm equally happy with)

Spiritus• 12 years ago

What's the problem with elisp?

So I was trying to make Emacs not drop its stupid temp files next to the opened file and found this piece of incomprehensible code:

    (setq backup-directory-alist
          `((".*" . ,temporary-file-directory)))

While in Vim:

    set backupdir=~/.vim/backups

Oh, and it seems I'm missing line numbers, let's google on how to enable them and found this page http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/LineNumbers

I still haven't gotten it to work.

Meanwhile in Vim

    set number

elwell5• 12 years ago

Mentioning elisp in the face of viml is questionable...

nick_riviera4• 12 years ago

Unless you need neither at which point less is more.

elwell5• 12 years ago

Brace yourself, an editor war will follow... and people commenting on the presence of an editor war... like this comment.

dghf• 12 years ago

"I used to make jokes about Emacs just as Emacs users about Vim but actually it seems to be a pretty decent piece of software."

BURN THE APOSTATE!

[Will this do?]

grundprinzip• 12 years ago

I don't know why, I find this post greatly uninformative. Yes, you can have some kind of Vim mode in Emacs (as you can in Sublime) and yes it takes time to remember key-bindings. If you have years of experience in Vim, why would you expect to get used to Emacs keybindings in a short time?

It's like moving to a foreign country and then continue to buy and to eat only your old local food, and go out and talk to only people from your old home. You will miss so much.

cies2• 12 years ago

Emacs+Evil is the next Vim.

And yes, CtrlP is probably the thing you'll miss most.

But all the other things I got from switching from Vim to Emacs+Evil easily outweigh the missing CtrlP.

Vim was great, until I wanted to customize it heavily. It is simply not made to facilitate things like: child processes, SSH, understanding my code, a visual interface for Git.

phaer4• 12 years ago

I haven't used CtrlP too much, but what are you missing in ido-mode or helm?

craigching3• 12 years ago

I only discovered ido about two years ago and, man, I can't imagine emacs without it now ... and I've been an emacs user for over 20 years! Only dabbled with helm a bit, there was one helm-enabled package that I really wanted to try.

MetaCosm8• 12 years ago

Fast proper fuzzy-find completion on files, buffers and tags that works across multiple platforms and even on files not in source control. In Vim I have it bound to <leader>f, <leader>b, <leader>t -- on my multiple trips over to Emacs land -- I have tried lots of ways to get the equivalent working and always come up short.

farresito2• 12 years ago

Take a look at Projectile. It works pretty much like CtrlP.

tokai• 12 years ago

I thought that neovim was the next vim.

omaranto4• 12 years ago

It might be the next one after Evil. Evil is already here, neovim is coming.

Symmetry• 12 years ago

I miss CtrlP, but I miss the jump list even more.

akerl_2• 12 years ago

Do one thing well. My text editor shouldn't be managing child processes or SSHing or trying to be a visual Git interface, and Vim does a great job displaying my code so I can understand it.

aaronem8• 12 years ago

Emacs does a great job at that, too. (In fact, it contains a complete Javascript parser, which is invaluable to me since that's the language around which my professional life revolves.)

It also does a great job managing child processes and SSHing. (Or FTPing, or speaking whatever other protocol you need to use to access remote files.) I can't speak to it as a visual Git interface, but I don't doubt it's at least reasonably good at that, too.

"Do one thing well" is a good start, sure. But why not aspire to more?

Dewie2• 12 years ago

Do one thing well.

Do you really demand that an OS should only 'do one thing well'? :ø)

clarry2• 12 years ago

Do one thing well does not really apply to larger user-interface applications that inherently have to aggregate lots of unrelated functionality. It applies to one-shot commands that you'd use in shell pipelines; that's why the other commandment is to use text streams. The point is that by combining these small utilities which do one thing well, you can create the aggregated functionality you need to perform a higher level task. Whereas if you didn't have these little utilities which do one thing well, you'd be scratching your head trying to figure out how to do something that a big monolithic application can do for you but which you need in a different context, i.e. where running that big monolithic application to do that one thing is very very incovenient if not impossible. Why do people quote this out of context?

If you stop and think about it, it's really pretty much impossible to define the "one thing" a code editor does.

Forcing the user build everything out of shell pipelines is not the goal, and achieves nothing. At some point, it is appropriate to build the aggregate and combine these functionalities for the user so that he doesn't have to do it himself. And in many cases, you end up reimplementing the thing because it is more efficient that way. The shell utility is still there for the user should he need it.

klibertp5• 12 years ago

Do one thing well.

For example, be an outstanding VM, IDE and a thriving ecosystem of libraries for development in a quite nice (and becoming better with each version) Lisp dialect.

Anyway, that's really a matter of preference. It's ok if you want to tell the world about yours, but try to word it in a way which isn't confrontational for people who have different preferences.

sjolsen4• 12 years ago

Programs that "do one thing well" are utterly useless unless you can compose them. Emacs is a tool that composes programs that do one thing well, like Bash or X.

Emacs, as has been said time and again, is not a text editor. It is, if anything, a development shell. It contains a text editing program (the default program), and that program does not manage child processes or SSH or Git.

You could also take the stance that Emacs _is_ a program that "does one thing well:" develop programs. That's the actual task of importance. Text editing is a secondary, ancillary task that owes its importance entirely to the archaic practice of representing complex interrelationships between data and operations on those data as a static linear stream of ASCII-encoded bytes.

Unfortunately, almost all programming languages are like this (hence, "languages"), but if you ever use Emacs to edit Lisp, you'll find that it's far less like text editing than it is like directly manipulating the abstract structure of the program. It does a reasonable job trying to replicate this experience in other languages, but when you have utterly inane constructions like seventeen-precedence-level infix notation, there's only so much you can do.

qbrass2• 12 years ago

Displaying code and editing it are two separate things. Sounds like Vim is pretty bloated acting as both an editor and a pager.

Use ed to edit, and pick a side in the more/less wars if you want to read it.

falcolas• 12 years ago

I tried Evil for about a month, and couldn't stand it. Some parts didn't work the same (ctags word boundaries), and the need to move back and forth between Evil mode and normal emacs mode when using other emacs plugins (it never worked quite right in plugins like magit) negated much of the benefit of having Evil mode in the first place.

I'll probably be sticking with boring old Vim and the command line.

platz• 12 years ago

There are many keybindings that conflict between emacs and evil/vim

pyre2• 12 years ago

understanding my code

Both Vim and Emacs have a horrible time trying to syntax highlight Perl, but I find Vim's flaws to be more tolerable. Emacs isn't some sort of panacea.

thebelal2• 12 years ago

I have written a good amount of perl in both Vim and Emacs and can't recall noticing bad syntax highlighting in either. Do you have an example?

klibertp5• 12 years ago

Fuzzy file finder was a thing I missed the most. Fuzzy-other-things-finders like ido and helm are there and work very well, but fuzzy file finding is either slow or incomplete with most solutions. So I found one plugin I liked - https://github.com/justinweiss/fuzzy-find-in-project - rewrote most of it and now I use it exclusively: https://github.com/piotrklibert/ffip

It's documented in the code - more or less - and I'm very happy with it, especially with having multiple directory sets I can change between (which I implemented recently) and how fast it is (aside from initial caching done by the ruby backend).

I actually never thought about releasing it publicly, so the readme is non-existent and the Ruby script is hacked with hardcoded ignores, fonts are not customizable, and it's even possible that I hacked the Ruby gem source at one point. I could clean it up a bit if there was some interest in it.

swah• 12 years ago

Isn't Helm, sucessor of Anything, much more than CtrlP could ever be?

bwilliams• 12 years ago

I tried using helm when I wanted to learn emacs and my problem is that helm is incredibly ugly, and customizing it would take a good amount of time.

alwillis2• 12 years ago

Emacs+Evil is the next Vim.

Actually, Vim is the next Vim--it only seems to get better and better.

After switching to Vim full-time about two years ago, I recently tackled exporting the text from a 10-year old PDF to markup it up using AsciiDoc[1] so I can output HTML and ePub.

It’s over 37,000 words but I was amazed how easily I was able to jump anywhere on the screen with just a few keystrokes fix all of the little things that need to be fixed in a text file.

And because editing paragraphs of text is somewhat different than what I normally do (writing HTML and CSS), it was pretty cool being able to leverage the composability[2] of Vim and how seamlessly that knowledge works in new contexts.

[1] http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/index.html [2]: https://medium.com/@mkozlows/why-atom-cant-replace-vim-43385...

lfuller2• 12 years ago

I don't understand why people want to do this in Vim. To me, a text editor should be extremely good at text editing / analysis and nothing else.

I use tmux, so all the advanced functionality of the terminal is only a single keypress away (to switch to another open terminal split).

JelteF2• 12 years ago

I hope you do use vim splits, since you have the same (copy/paste) buffers then.

hollerith• 12 years ago

When I visit a file in Emacs, indications appear on the screen (in the "mode line") as to which version-control system, if any, the file is under the control of and whether the file contains any non-checked-in changes.

Perhaps grandparent wants something like that in Vim if it does not exist already.

ue_• 12 years ago

Emacs isn't really just a text editor though, it's a Lisp environment whose primary use is as a text editor. It's possible to do many other things in it, so much so that it's joked about as being an operating system in its own right. Emacs is extremely good at text editing, but it's not just a text editor.

JelteF2• 12 years ago

I'm not sure why you need child processes or SSH (I mean you can use vim over SSH). But have you tried syntastic for the syntax checking? And I'm not sure what kind of visual interface you want for git, bit the combination of fugitive and gitgutter (super simple but awesome) works quite well for me.

elwell5• 12 years ago

My main concern with Emacs (at least on Windows) is that it actually crashes every now and then. I haven't dealt with many programs in the past few years that do still that.

jeremiep5• 12 years ago

I haven't used Emacs on Windows much but from what I remember crashing wasn't my main issue with it: slow I/O access time were the issue. For some reason they were orders of magnitude slower than on linux/osx.

elwell5• 12 years ago

Hmm... this post didn't seem to say that much. We got a couple points and then a sudden conclusion. Just saying...

craigching3• 12 years ago

I agree, but it did kick off another "vim vs emacs" which is always fun :)

mercurial4• 12 years ago

It's still too slow for me. I have often several vims open, usually for a short time, and I'm not going to start a daemon in my session to have a decent startup time, that's unreasonable. Also, even setting a theme like solarized dark turned out to be a headache last time I tried. I think I'll wait for neovim.

omaranto4• 12 years ago

You mean startup time without using the server and client setup is too slow, right? (That's easily solved by, well, using the server and client setup, of course.)

I find that in actual operation Emacs is faster and that's the reason I switched from Vim to Emacs. Even after using all the tricks in Vim's :help tex-slow, Vim still lagged when I scrolled or even typed into LaTeX files (unless I turned off syntax highlighting), and I'm not such a great typist. Emacs is perfectly snappy.

mercurial4• 12 years ago

Ah, I'm not a Latex person. In my experience, vim works fine, even on very large files, unless you combine syntax highlighting with very long lines, in which case you're going to suffer.

But yes, I admit that I find silly that I should need a 'server' for a text editor. Not to mention that I remote into various VMs regularly which would also need to get their own server/client setup if I wanted a homogeneous working environment.

bcarrell• 12 years ago

even setting a theme like solarized dark turned out to be a headache last time I tried.

  (package-install solarized-theme)
  (load-theme 'solarized-dark t)

That's it.

therealmarv• 12 years ago

So many Emacs articles the recent days... please tell me: Should I really switch to Emacs as a web developer? Is it really superior to SublimeText and Brackets for a web dev?

nick_riviera4• 12 years ago

No. Use what you are comfortable with. There is a cost incurred for changing (time) that may or may not have a sensible return as an editor is a very personal thing to choose.

jeremiep5• 12 years ago

How else can you get comfortable with something different that is potentially better than what you're currently using?

Learning Emacs or Vim is an investment, one that last your entire life. I will gladly be less productive for a few weeks to gain much more in the long run.

atmosx• 12 years ago

I'm using vim. The thing is for text-based editors you need to configure specific workflows for languages other than C. Ruby and Python (probably others) have acceptable workflows (identation, completion, run, snippets, etc.) The workflow can be extremely optimised.

But for CSS/SCSS and JS I find easier to use espresso[1]. That's because it's made for web-dev and I don't need to setup my own workflow. I believe same thing is with Sublime Text. It's better to use for web-dev IMHO compared to VIM/EMACS.

ps. That said, I always believed that the editor is a tool. It's better to learn your current editor's ins and outs than switching back and forth from editor to editor.

[1] http://macrabbit.com/espresso/

terhechte• 12 years ago

It depends on how you plan your future. I've used quite a few text editors over the years (Bluefish, Scite, Homesite, Phase5, Idle, TextMate, Vim, others). I switched to Emacs more than a year ago with one clear goal: Not having to switch anymore. You see, most of the editors above (except vim) used to be good and then were deprecated, sold, stopped, and so on. Which of those has been existing for more than 20 years and is still able to hold up to new editors. Sadly, none (One could argue for TextMate 2, but in between there were many, many years of staleness).

I was fed up with having to switch to a newfangled editor every so many years, having to identify new plugins, having to learn new keybindings. I've used Vim for 7 years (I think) and it came pretty close, but in the end the archaic VimScript language and the lack of async commands was something that was nagging me. I wanted to call an editor home, and hone my skills until I pass away, increasing my arcane knowledge over 10-20 years, learning ever more about the scripting language, commands, and writing more and more specific plugins that help with my tasks.

I still want to be coding in 10 years, but I don't want to switch text editors ever again. Emacs shall be my final editor [1], and that's why I decided to switch. Because I can see Emacs still going strong in another 20 years. I wouldn't want to say that about Sublime, or really any other editor right now.

[1] There's a case to be made that NeoVim is going to be great, and it may well be, but right now I'm really, really, really happy with Emacs + Evil. Nothing is perfect, of course, but the things that bug me are really, really small things that I could probably even fix, if I'd invest enough time; but they don't bug me enough for that.

e12e3• 12 years ago

Maybe I'm a bit dense, but when are asynchronous commands a pain point in an editor? I mean, you can run eg a script that forks into the background, right? I'm not sure I really want to do "r! long-running-thing-that-updates-buffer". I can see me wanting to do "! long-running-compile &" (in the background). And I can do that in vim?

pawelk• 12 years ago

I'm a web dev who has switched to Emacs a few years ago. In the first year I went from throwing profanities at it to writing some basic elisp code to refresh the active browser tab after saving the file, before watch tasks for nodejs were even a thing.

I can't say that you should switch, or that it's superior to anything, but I think you could at least give it a try. And by this I mean: use it as your only text editor for as long as you can invest (a week, maybe a month). Start with the built-in tutorial, install: ido, web-mode, js2-mode, maybe add yas-mode. Install a nice color theme. Learn the key bindings in web-mode to efficiently navigate HTML documents. Try to perform some tasks using macros. While editing try to forget you even have a mouse. Discover the little things, like "undo" being able to be narrowed to the selected lines instead of global linear history, or the kill-ring (you can paste form previous "cut" operations, not just the recent one).

There's some un-learning and re-learning of everyday tings like the shortcuts for copy/paste or the concept of selection vs. region, but for me it was a good investment. I can't say it'll be good for you, but I encourage you to try - if you won't switch you'll at least get a better understanding of what you like about your current editors.

jheriko• 12 years ago

notepad and other modern solutions... they are ubiquitous for a reason. typing is such a tiny part of programmer productivity compared to thinking...

... do a little more thinking and never have this problem again, learn to adapt to whatever text editor is on the system etc.

hellodevnull• 12 years ago

I used to this like this but honestly once an editor like vim or emacs becomes second nature, typing and editing and moving text around the screen feels a lot smoother and make programming more enjoyable.

But I still don't think "you might have to use a machine that only has vim installed and not your preferred editor!" is a good reason to spend time mastering how to use it (which is what I often hear). If you prefer emacs or sublime or whatever, use it, and just put up with vim if you're on this hypothetical scenario where they're not available.

gergles• 12 years ago

I do wonder what it would be like to use an editor where the main cursor navigation was forward/backward incremental search. One case of this is the Canon CAT[1] word processor, which used "LEAP" keys for cursor movement (and nothing else).

I'm often curious how productive it would be to use while coding.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat Bonus link: http://clickamericana.com/media/advertisements/the-canon-cat...

muraiki• 12 years ago

The EasyMotion plugin for vim has a feature similar to this. When I start searching it matches incrementally, highlighting matches on each screen which I can cycle through with tab. When I see a screen with the match I want, I press enter and then the first 1 or 2 characters of each match are replaced with something like a, b, or ;a. Pressing the appropriate key combination jumps straight to the desired word.

However, if you're just editing text on the same screen you can skip the search. I have it set up so that I press ,w and then every word after my cursor has its first one or two characters replaced. I can jump to any word by pressing those. There's also a hybrid mode where pressing one key and then the first letter of the desired word highlights only those matching words on the entire screen, which I can then jump to.

https://github.com/Lokaltog/vim-easymotion/

omaranto4• 12 years ago

When I use Vim or Emacs, forward/backward incremental search is the main cursor navigation. :)

So, to answer your question about what it's like: it's great!

bmoresbest552• 12 years ago

I still do not undertand the devotion that people have with these text editors. I prefer Vim however I could see myself using it soley or even half the time. I feel like I know the basic commands and it is fast but with the ease of a sublime text or something similar why do people still use these pieces of software so frequently? (Not a rhetorical question)

jeremiep5• 12 years ago

They take a while to master, but once you get there no other editor on the planet can compete. Not by a long shot. And then you keep on learning.

They also can run in a remote console which for me is reason alone not to use another editor.

oafitupa4• 12 years ago

"They also can run in a remote console which for me is reason alone not to use another editor."

As a developer, that makes no sense to me. Do you really need a powerful remote editor? What do you need a remote editor for, other than checking that a config file was set up correctly, or reading a log file?

ansible• 12 years ago

Rarely do I need a remote editor, where I don't also need a remote shell. So I'm using GNU screen all the time now.

Years ago, I finally made a little time-investment in learning Screen, and it has definitely paid off. I hear that tmux is better, but I don't have any missing requirements from my current setup, so I haven't tried to learn it.

andersonvom• 12 years ago

I think mode-based editing will be the answer of almost everyone, plus the imperative that you have to have a shortcut for everything.

That makes vim/emacs not only fast editors in the processing sense, but editors where you can be really fast at what you do. All this comes at a steep learning curve, which is the only downside I can see.

beefsack• 12 years ago

People don't use Vim and Emacs for ease of use, they use them for the power and efficiency they eventually provide once you reach a certain level of proficiency.

Cakez0r• 12 years ago

I couldn't imagine using standalone vim as an IDE either... However, if you want the best of both worlds then Visual Studio has a vim emulation plugin (VsVim) and Sublime has vim emulation mode too!

2muchcoffeeman• 12 years ago

Yep, it is the vim bindings and mode based editing that I love. XVim for Xcode, IdeaVim for Idea, and all those editors with vim modes. I used to hate vim, but once I got used to it, I'm just so much faster.

mercurial4• 12 years ago

It depends, but if you do Haskell, with syntastic and ghcmod-vim, you get most of what I care about in an IDE, namely getting warning of errors before trying to run my program.

The Vim plugin for Visual Studio is very good, in my memory. Note that Kate has also a pretty good Vim mode. There is also a decent free Vim plugin for Eclipse [1].

1: http://vrapper.sourceforge.net/home/

gnur3• 12 years ago

I use vim because it's bindings correspond with my thought process.

My thought is: "Let's change the next 2 words", my fingers type c2w (change word).

The bindings take quite a while to learn, I started using vi mode in komodo edit, but once I realized that bindings like ci" didn't work I switched over to macvim. I haven't used any other editor since then (4 years ago).

The other reason is that I mainly "develop" (hobby) on my vps, having a vim session open in tmux allows me to use nearly any pc in the world and I'm in business to continue where I left off.

hibikir• 12 years ago

I love this explanation of why you like vim, because it's very honest, and one where I can disagree with your preference while having no problem with your argument.

My brain does not work like vim at all. I do not count words. I do not think about whether I want to change, jump or delete. Therefore, I've never been able to use any vi flavor even semi competently: I can technically work in it, and I have read about all the commands, but I am actually slower in Vim than I'd be in windows Notepad, because it's internals do not 'speak' to me at all.

I had a lot more luck with emacs, because I can ignore anything that even considers those low level operations, and just use it's higher level features, like buffers.

Still, I end up doing better in an IDE, because most of my editing is of code, and an IDE understands the code I am writing far better than emacs or vi could.

nkuttler• 12 years ago

Vim is extremely powerful once you master it. It was released in 1991 and is still around. If you go back to Vi it's history goes back to the 70s. It might not matter to you, but as somebody who has written code for more than a decade, I'm glad I don't have to learn a new interface every time the producer of a proprietary editor goes out of business.

Yes, learning the basics is harder than with other editors. Once you master them you have a superior tool you'll be able to use for the rest of your life.

super_mario2• 12 years ago

Because UNIX shell is the most powerful integrated programming environment for development with any language/technology combination. Instead of your typical menu commands (you are lucky if you have 100 or so commands to do very basic and limited things on a selection that you must build with mouse manually) you literally have tens of thousands of extremely sophisticated commands that can easily be chained together to produce amazing things with very little work.

Vim is just part of that tool chain designed to edit text efficiently. Vim is not so much a text editor as it is a language for manipulating text. Vim has dozens of motion commands to move cursor over chars, words, sentences, paragraphs, code blocks, methods, pages, regex etc. So general form of vim commands is nCm i.e. repeat n times command C to the text cursor moves over with motion command m. So for example w is a command that moves to the next word. d is a delete command. So, dw says delete word. 5dw says delete next 5 words. Let's say you are inside if (.) block and you want to change the if condition. ci( says "change inner bracket text" (i.e. everything inside brackets). This deletes everything inside () and puts you to INSERT mode and let's you type new condition.

This makes Vim extremely predictable and discoverable. You learn a new command say gU (turn to upper case) and you immediately know how to turn to upper case entire word because you know how to move by words with w. gUw turn entire word to upper case. gU) turns entire sentence to upper case, etc.

After a while these things just become part of you, and you become really fast at bending text to your will without even thinking. The fact that you can navigate text/code and get to where you want in matter of milliseconds (faster than it takes you to take the hand off the keyboard and reach for the mouse, shake the mouse to find where the cursor is etc) is amazingly liberating of disruptive context switches.

And then if you add shell integration, it means you can apply advanced filters to your text to do pretty much anything. This gets as esoteric as run filter on regex in lines that match another regex, where regex can be any Perl compatible regular expression. But can also be as simple as reformat code, beautify paragraph, insert current date, listing of directory etc. Then you add code completion, file navigation etc and you have something amazing.

pjmlp• 12 years ago

Because UNIX shell is the most powerful integrated programming environment for development with any language/technology combination.

Only if you never experimented with a Lisp / Smalltalk REPL from the old Xerox PARC environments.

EDIT: Should have mentioned the later Lisp Machines and Oberon (specially System 3) as well.

LunaSea• 12 years ago

But typing speed is never an issue when programming. It's just not the bottleneck.

bmoresbest552• 12 years ago

So where would you suggest going to learn all of this seemingly endless amount of information?

MetaCosm8• 12 years ago

Craftsmen and tools. It is an age old story, you grow to trust and understand a tool. Programmers and text editors are an extreme example, because programmers often spend 30+ hours a week using a single too, their editor.

Vim and Emacs have survived because they are "fit for a purpose"... they are really good at editing text! Emacs has a niche in expandability. You can always twist Emacs to do your bidding... and it has a culture of tinkers. Vim has much more of a culture of users, people who want to edit text rather that toy with their editor.

These editors have roots in the 70s and are still kicking -- that isn't some random accident, that is because the fundamental act of editing text hasn't change too much.

alwillis2• 12 years ago

Vim has much more of a culture of users, people who want to edit text rather that toy with their editor.

I don’t know about that. I really got into Vim because it’s so customizable. The number of general purpose and very specific plugins is pretty amazing.

And the Vim Awesome site that tracks plugins is pretty damn awesome: http://vimawesome.com

santiagobasulto• 12 years ago

"a pretty decent piece of software"?

sprayk• 12 years ago

I really wanted to use Org-mode, but my vim muscle memory and lack of knowledge of keybindings to do useful things like copy/paste and move around with more than just arrow keys were preventing me from being productive. Finally got Evil installed and haven't looked back! Evil and Org-mode work great together.

hsitz• 12 years ago

They do work fine together, but unless you remap the Org-mode control key combinations then none of your Org-mode specific stuff will feel very vim-like. I think one good little project would be to remap all the Org functions to vim-like key sequences. The info in this newslist thread is a small start on that: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/52815

rorykirchner3• 12 years ago

There are a nice set of org-mode bindings for evil-mode in the prelude-evil.el module that helps quite a bit:

https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude/blob/master/modules/prelu...

athenot• 12 years ago

Whether it's vim or emacs, I've always been amazed how these tools can become an extension of the brain like an instrument whose purpose is to materialize a thought process. Framed that way, the editor wars look like a pianist debating with a violinist of the superiority of their respective instruments to convey human emotion.

Watching a seasoned vim or emacs user create, mold, shape, reformat text like it was a piece of clay in the hands of a potter is truly inspiring.

As for me, my instrument of choice is Sublime Text (which, I guess, downgrades me to the status of a flute player), though I occasionally use vim for Ops stuff. I think there are some mac-centric UX patterns that I have a hard time giving up.

aaronem8• 12 years ago

I think there are some mac-centric UX patterns that I have a hard time giving up.

I can certainly understand that; I'm a relative newcomer to the platform, and while Emacs (of course) continues to behave regarding meta keys in the fashion I've spent a lifetime learning, getting used to Option-arrows for "move to next/previous word", and Command instead of Control for shortcuts, is really bothering me.

(Of course, that's mostly just because forcing the user to cramp her hand up like that, in order to access even the most commonly used keyboard shortcuts, is just a really stupid and un-Apple-like piece of user interaction design, and I've yet to find a good way to fix it.)

craigching3• 12 years ago

Command instead of Control for shortcuts

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but it sounds like you're using one of the Mac OSX ports of emacs that tries to make emacs behave more like a Mac app. My advice is don't do that. Use emacsformacos.com [1]. It's plain ol' GNU emacs built for the Mac platform. I was so glad to find this and quickly gave up Aquamacs. I want my emacs to behave the same whether I'm on Mac or Linux (or Windows for that matter, but I'm doing less and less on Windows these days).

Let me know if I've misunderstood you!

[1] -- http://emacsformacosx.com/

unhammer2• 12 years ago

When I had a Mac, I would use Command as Meta (and caps as ctrl, which is a good idea no matter what OS/editor you're using).

(Unfortunately option is still needed for certain symbol, like /|\, in many keymaps, but that's the mac's fault , not emacs.)

mmorris• 12 years ago

If you'd like to properly remap move to next/previous word and other commands in Mac OS X, I'd recommend Karabiner (which was previously called KeyRemap4Macbook).

https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/

I use it to map the emacs navigation keys for use across the OS, and find it really improves my experience. If you're interested in that set up, I use the following options, which are all listed under Emacs Mode: - Control + PNBF to Up/Down/Left/Right - Control + A/E to Command + Left/Right - Option + B/F to Option + Left/Right - Control + D to Forward Delete

Of course, I have caps lock remapped to Control.

There are also Vi remap options in Karabiner, plus tons of other stuff.

Disclaimer: I'm a bit of an emacs lightweight, so it might be that the remapping options aren't as full-featured as what a more advanced user would like.

rthomas64• 12 years ago

What's wrong with flute players?

qbrass2• 12 years ago

They steal your children if you don't pay them.

acomjean3• 12 years ago

Aquaemacs is a emacs with some very mac-centric key bindings. It drives purists nuts but I kinda think it works really well.

weavie2• 12 years ago

The last time I tried Emacs+Evil I found that when pressing Ctrl+[ there was a slight delay when moving back into command mode. I was constantly tripping up when typing furiously.

This alone was enough to move me back to Vim. Everything else about Emacs was awesome. I would love to go back if I could get over this one problem..

DrStrngeluv• 12 years ago

Were you using console mode emacs? I use evil+emacs and I use it in its own window instead of on the console for that very reason.

weavie2• 12 years ago

Yes, I live in the console.

rorykirchner3• 12 years ago

You can fix that by setting this:

(setq evil-esc-delay 0)

jeffbr13• 12 years ago

Vim's home-row commands are great... Unless you use a non-QWERTY keyboard layout.

A lot of developers forget that there exist other methods of input, and mnemonic-based shortcuts are one of those things that make a lot more sense than attempting to optimise for a tiny reduction in finger-movement (which ought to be the domain of the input-device anyway).

chillacy• 12 years ago

Actually as a dvorak user I find it tolerable. jk are where cv sit and hl is jp, which means going up/down is left hand, left right on the right hand, and the keys are in the correct orientation as well

thebelal2• 12 years ago

Vim works with colemak quite well with only a few rotated keybindings to get back home row navigation.

Gonzih2• 12 years ago

Wanna have fun with emacs? Try to integrate evil mode nicely in different plugins. Especially if you use totally different key bindings in vi (non qwerty layout for example). It was very painful experience for me. Yes, vim is far from ideal, yes neo-vim is looking like to be next iteration in vim evolution, yes no parallel tasks execution is pain. But at the same time there is vimproc. For clojure integration there is fireplace.vim which is also amazing in my opinion, for git there is fugitive. I don't see any real comparison in this post, more like "I was bored with vim, now I use emacs".

int3• 12 years ago

I tried evil-mode myself and came to a similar conclusion re integration.

And for package management there's vundle, neobundle, and pathogen. And after my recent discovery of vimproc, I'm now motivated to resume writing plugins!

leishulang2• 12 years ago

Not to mention that the Evil Mode editing messes up the Emacs repl. At least for clojure.

aidenn0• 12 years ago

Works fine with SLIME; I use evil/emacs/slime for my daily lisp dev.

Aissen• 12 years ago

You have exactly the same problem with a non-standard key-binding/layout and vim. For instance, the default file browsing plugin netrw hardcodes its shortcuts…

Gonzih2• 12 years ago

I was able to change netrw. You just need to know few tricks github.com/Gonzih/.vim/blob/master/after/syntax/netrw.vim

farresito2• 12 years ago

Yep, pretty much what I have experienced. I'm a vim user who uses emacs for clojure, and I've found a lot of incompatibilities with other plugins. It's not too bad; evil + paredit make up for those deficiencies.

exDM69• 12 years ago

Yeah, evil-mode just doesn't play nice with lots of emacs utilities.

It's a good idea to use evil-mode only in code/text buffers and stay out of it when using e.g. GUD debugging. This, unfortunately, means that you're going to have to learn two sets of keybindings, the vanilla emacs ones and vim keys.

MetaCosm8• 12 years ago

Yeah... getting caught out of evil mode can be scary... WHAT DO I PRESS TO LEAVE... CTRL-F... dafuq?

jeffreyrogers• 12 years ago

I was looking at Slackware Linux the other day and came across this page http://www.slackware.com/install/softwaresets.php. I enjoyed how emacs got its own software set due to its size.

dang• 12 years ago

Is anybody besides me still having the problem with Emacs on Mavericks where the OS X distnoted process gradually eats up gigabytes of RAM? It seems to have to do with running multiple instances of Emacs.

cefstat• 12 years ago

There is a patch that supposedly solves this problem. Homebrew applies this patch to Emacs and after I started using this I did not notice any more problems with distnoted. I am not sure if other Emacs builds also apply this patch.

YuriNiyazov• 12 years ago

Yes. Problem goes away after manually compiling the the latest HEAD, which is admittedly not the best solution.

__david__3• 12 years ago

http://emacsformacosx.com/builds

The latest nightlies and pretest (the ones marked "Multi") have this fixed. It's a super frustrating bug.

amitp• 12 years ago

Yes. Frustrating bug. I ended up compiling my own, but I think the newer pretests have the fix. If you want to build your own pretest with the "Yamamoto Mitsuharu" version of Emacs (railwaycat), I posted the commands I ran: http://amitp.blogspot.com/2014/04/building-mac-os-x-emacs.ht...

azinman2• 12 years ago

Vim.

rdtsc3• 12 years ago

I completely do not understand how anyone can use Emacs’ default keybindings.

I completely do not understand how switching modes is a good idea in an editor. It just doesn't fit in my brain somehow. I start typing and randomly end up pasting and cutting. I want to paste and cut it randomly types my commands in insert mode.

Emacs cords are pretty intuitive to me. I don't know many: just moving, saving, creating 2 windows, search & replace, cutting and pasting. There are hundreds more, but you can get away with a few basic ones.

Save needing to rebind the Ctrl key to CapsLock, emacs key-bindings are optimized to not have to move the hands to the mouse or arrow keys, which I appreciate. Vim's are as well, but again I don't like modes, so there is that.

Afton2• 12 years ago

I can't find it now, but the guy running http://www.viemu.com/blog/ has a good explanation for this problem. Basically, while there are modes, you don't work like that. You are always in command mode, and you slip briefly into e.g. insert mode, before popping back out to the 'default' command mode. This perfectly described how I work in Vim, and when I passed it around my office, several people had 'ahah!' moments. YMMV.

jng• 12 years ago

http://www.viemu.com/a-why-vi-vim.html

base698• 12 years ago

I know both well, and emacs are essential to navigating Mac OSX UI. If someone ever catches you typing in gmail they will ask how you are moving around so fast.

I tried emacs until my pinky hurt so bad I switched to vim.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs#.22Emacs_pinky.22

mcguire2• 12 years ago

Anyone who thinks Emacs isn't modal hasn't opened a buffer on a directory.

rdtsc3• 12 years ago

Then closer the buffer. I've only opened it by accident. To use Vim I can't "disable" modes and only into modes by accident, I am forced to use them.

So no, emacs is not modal like Vim. But good try, good try...

Besides, why not use speedbar, that opens a nice directory browser and you can open files by clicking on them.

rorykirchner3• 12 years ago

emacs-prelude is a nice way to get started with emacs if you are a vim user: https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude

You can enable the prelude-evil.el module and start out with a nice set of bindings. It would be sweet if there were some more pull requests to make the evil-mode bindings in prelude more closely match vim.

mcguire2• 12 years ago

This weekend's project: ed mode for Emacs.

tach4n• 12 years ago

Another option for "modal" editing in emacs is god-mode(1). It lets you use emacs commands without modifier keys. I have it set to change my mode-line color when it's activated, it's great if you want a little taste of vim but not the problem of trying to shoehorn vim key-bindings into emacs.

1. https://github.com/chrisdone/god-mode

MichaelDickens2• 12 years ago

I used to use this, but I found that a lot of the convenience of modal editing comes from the ability to compose commands. I took the time to learn Vim keybindings; now I use evil-mode and I like it a lot better than god-mode.

orthecreedence• 12 years ago

Emacs + evil, sure, but please don't forget vim + slimv. I tried emacs for a bit when I was first jumping into lisp, but was also evaluating vim at the same time. After about 6 weeks I was having fun with vim. About a year later, I was really fast in vim. Fast forward another year or two, I think in vim. There are no modes or movements or searches. There's just what's in my brain and it sort of writes itself. Granted, I'll stop and think to record macros here and there, but otherwise it's all really fluid. Add the fact that I do lots of server admin to the mix, and heyyyy there's vim already there. How ya doing ol' buddy?

Then you add slimv to the mix. Honestly I never gave slime a fair shake. I barely scratched the surface. But once I got slimv up and running, I felt like I didn't need to learn emacs+slime. Maybe there are some things I don't know about that I'm missing out on, but slimv, like vim, let's me think in lisp.

So if you're a lisper and you like vim, don't jump ship yet! Give slimv a shot.

laichzeit04• 12 years ago

I tried slimv recently and couldn't get it to work with Racket. There's a swank Racket project on github but it was extremely buggy. I also tried mit-scheme and it was buggy as well. It randomly freezes and I don't know why. (latest vim, etc.)

What do you use it for? It seems if you're using common lisp it's perfect, for everything else it works "in principle" but not really.

vince_refiti2• 12 years ago

Can I ask why you don't use DrRacket? Write your code in the definitions panel and hit f5.

ThatGeoGuy• 12 years ago

I've been using the plugin vim-slime (https://github.com/jpalardy/vim-slime) recently alongside tmux in order to do REPL development in Scheme / Python.

To be honest I found it more straightforward to use, and the great thing is that it doesn't require any Swank servers to run, and it works with just about any REPL based language. I find it hard to live without it nowadays, though if you're on windows I would expect you'll have difficulties in using this.

jadyoyster• 12 years ago

For what its worth, Emacs users usually use Geiser with Racket. Might be why Swank doesn't work all that well.

Igglyboo• 12 years ago

So when i'm programming I find myself spending far more time thinking about what to type next than actually typing it, seems to me like there isn't much to gain by learning vim/emacs or am I missing something?

SEMW• 12 years ago

There's a reason vim & emacs are referred to as great 'editors': their advantages show mostly when editing & refactoring. They don't help you with code that flows from your head to your hands fully-formed much more than any other editor or IDE. Where they do help is in making actions like 'swap this block of code with this one'; 'replace the text inside these brackets with this', 'execute this sequence of actions on everything matching this regex' etc. efficient.

BrandonM• 12 years ago

Doesn't that argument work just as well for touch typing? Would you argue that being a touch typist is useless?

Do you ever use keyboard shortcuts... Ctrl-A, Ctrl-F, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-Z, Shift-End, etc.? Extrapolate that to everything you might want to do when reading, reviewing, or editing a text file.

axiomabsolute• 12 years ago

People often mistake the succinctness of vim's commands as an attempt to save a few keystrokes typing, but that's only a side benefit.

The vim command structure makes it trivial to define transformations on common blocks of text; words, sentences, paragraphs (lines), blocks of code inside {..}, etc. It makes it easy to repeat those commands, by repeating them a fixed number of times, applying them to every instance in the file, or asking for confirmation around each one.

But, most importantly, it means that we can now extract that little bit of text-transforming functionality into a script we can save and bind to a new command (if it's something particularly reusable). This is really what vim is about to me - providing a language to describe text transformations, in the form of sequences of commands. This means that the way I code every day, conveniently saving me a few seconds like you mentioned above, is the same method I use when writing/editing plugins/macros for the editor to do more complicated tasks, like say consistently formatting every line of a log file that begins with [ERROR] and removing all other lines, so we can process it with some other tool.

Sure, you could write a script in [python/perl/ruby/etcetcetc] to do all that just as well, but the point is that Vim provides a nice little domain specific language right at your fingertips, optimized for working with text at a higher level, capable of handling one-off jobs as easily as big jobs over a whole log file or even as a little command to be reused later.

prawks• 12 years ago

A lot of it can also come down to pure fun. I really enjoy programming in vim, and I had fun learning a new tool.

It's not always about pure efficiency metrics. I code better when I enjoy using my tools.

gatehouse• 12 years ago

You are thinking about "what to type". In an editor with a rich set of text editing commands, what you can type is expanded. So when you are thinking about it, what you can think is expanded.

sousousou• 12 years ago

I'm both a vim and emacs user. I love vim for all the reasons everyone always mentions, but emacs comes out ahead consistently basically because emacs-lisp is so much more usable to me than vimscript. I find it much easier to create or modify plugins in emacs... Don't like the (often overfeatureful) functionality of a plugin? Change it!

bshanks• 12 years ago

I use emacs with the 'viper' mode extension, along with a custom keymap that i made that places the keys i use most on and near the home keys: https://github.com/bshanks/viperre

I actually use viperre with a Colemak keyboard map, but there's a QWERTY mode too.

pvaldes• 12 years ago

(I'm currently toying with the editor able (ql:quickload "able") (able:start), so at this moment, I'm not in a good position to figth at those thumb wars... but, as long time and happy emacs user, I need to tell the world that "little pinky" is alive and tipping, thanks)

You can have it all, emacs, and vi... so, what is the bigg fuss?

tuhdo5• 12 years ago

If you want to see what Emacs is capable of, check "Emacs Mini Manual" that has the demo at the beginning: http://tuhdo.github.io/emacs-tutor.html

Then, if you worry about fuzzy project finders, better one exists that does not need fuzzy (I ditched all fuzzy finders for it): http://tuhdo.github.io/helm-intro.html

Emacs and Vim

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