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Comment by nextlevelwizard | Hacker News Reader

Completely anecdotally I've ever met two person who used Emacs and handful of people who use vim. At my current job I'm the only one who uses vim as my main tool, but collegue sitting next to me is the other Emacs user. Although some poeople have started to dabble in vim every now and then. I guess people just run into vim more often in the wild.

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It's an anecdote that describes my experience as well. In more than ten years I've only met three other people who use Emacs (and one other person who uses WindowMaker :-) ), and I've often been the only Emacs user in an entire department.

Relatedly, the emacs users I’ve met were 10+ years older than me (so far).

Also, a huge number of other editors have vim keybindings as an option or plugin: intellij, eclipse, visual studio - the list goes on forever...

The funny thing is, emacs has the most compatible vi mode and they call it the evil-mode. Happy user for many years.

I've been using evil-mode for a few years and I'm also very happy with it. It's the only vim emulation I've seen so far that implements "g?" (rot13). That's how compatible this mode is.

Check out spacemacs then :-)

Already running it! Although I have this in my head that I need to create my own emacs configuration from scratch and learn more how it works. Someday...

I use a Mac, where most text field by default support at least some readline keybindings, so Emacs knowledge comes in handy :)

(try it yourself! If you're on a Mac, open the reply box in a browser that uses Mac-native controls, and start typing, then hit C-a or C-e or other readline key combos and see which ones work)

There used to be a kext that would make Mac text fields respect vim keybindings. (Maybe there still is, but I've lost track of how to use kexts safely these days, or whether it's even possible.) I miss it terribly.

> a huge number of other editors have vim keybindings as an option or plugin: intellij, eclipse, visual studio - the list goes on forever...

I think I managed to crash the IntelliJ vim keybinding mode like twenty times when trying to get used to vim.

I did try later to just use vim on it's own, but it really doesn't appeal to me at all, I have to google pretty much everything I need to get done and that takes so much time, is there a way to make vim show a help bar just like nano has?

I printed a cheat sheet. The first 1-2 weeks are less productive. After that, it’s «life before and after». Would recommend learning plain vim, just to keep yourself from getting confused from what’s vim and what’s intellij.

Completely anecdotally as well, all 3 emacs users that I know are the most brilliant developers that I know.

Extending your anecdote with my own clarifying anecdote: I know some brilliant Vim users, but I don't know any non-brilliant Emacs users.

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