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Comment by Philipp__ | Hacker News Reader

I was split between using Emacs and Vim for last 2 years (I used Vim for last 6, and learned Emacs 2 years ago). But what made Vim my main editor is fzf and ag, and smooth workflow that I had in terminal. But I have to say, ivy and counsel made my Emacs experience much, much nicer. But I guess that I got too deep into Vim already that I kinda got used to it so much, that I appreciated more that "terminal" workflow.

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> I was split between using Emacs and Vim for last 2 years

You're going to have to pick a side. You can't be an atheist that dabbles in Catholicism.

A friend of mine is an avid Spacemacs user (which, as far as I understand, is a Vim distribution running on Emacs or something like that). He has both a Vim and an Emacs sticker on his notebook next to each other, and they've been carefully applied so that they overlap each other both ways.

Some men just want to watch the world burn.

I had tried spacemacs for a few months, it was nice overall, but everything seemed to be a little bit slower there than in vim, so I eventually switched back to vim.

I picked vim in the end because I already got really used to the workflow I previously mentioned.

But there are many nice things from Emacs that I really miss. For example magit, various REPL integrations and much better support for functional programming languages. Emacs felt cool and nerdy but I always felt like I was using 1% of it. Many things on the other hand felt much more clunky than I expected (terminals for example). And I don't like all in one philosophy of people reading emails, reading reddit, chatting on IRC all through emacs. I tried many of those things but didn't find it appealing at all.

But if I had to do some serious work in one of the functional languages I can see myself coming back to Emacs pretty easily.

I'm a vigorous vim user, and always want to incorporate emacs into my workflow or try to utilize its strength. So far, I just failed several times and the affection to vim grows stronger.

It be easier for everyone if you just admitted you use vim because you've not yet figured out how to exit it.

Ctrl Alt SysReq + REISUB

(It's the only way.)

(longtime Emacs user here)

  I'd never consider switching; I'm in too deep.
  It might be easier to change religions, than change editors.

> But what made Vim my main editor is fzf and ag, and smooth workflow that I had in terminal.

For emacs, try helm to replace fzf (or just use fzf.el). helm-ag is awesome. On the terminal, just alias 'vi' to 'emacsclient -nw -a ""'.

If you miss the vi keybindings (which are a pretty nice way to deal with code), then evil-mode or a full Spacemacs are pretty good options for you.

I tried helm, but it induced slight lag, bigger loading times, and I didn't like that. I had big ass emacs configuration, it felt heavy and sluggish. That was the moment where I declared bankruptcy and started from beginning where I created 250 LOC config, with no big plugins like helm.

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