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Comment by thomastjeffery | Hacker News Reader

emacsclient really fills the gap for me.

I have emacs running as a systemd service, so I never notice its real start time.

> I don't actually want Vim to grow to approach Emacs in customization.

It already has. The difference is that it doesn't come with very many packages, and packages aren't all written in elisp.

Neovim will end up with a similar amount of packages eventually. A lot of those packages will be written in Lua, making them relatively fast and lightweight.

(Neo)Vim doesn't lend itself to total customizability, since its foundation is dependent on its default keybindings.

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Careful running emacs as a systemd service. I did this for some time, but then one day when I rebooted the computer, nothing worked - drives weren't mounted properly, services I expected weren't there. I finally found that none of my systemd services had come up (but systemd didn't generate errors or failed messages) and yet later still discovered that it was apparently an error in my .emacs that had somehow caused a domino effect of none of my systemd services starting up.

I've gone back to just having `emacs --daemon` in my .xnitrc.

I've had errors in my .emacs, and had no issues. I don't see your experience as a reason to not to do it this way.

In case you are interested, I followed the instructions here: https://nixos.org/nixos/manual/index.html#idm140737316012272

I imagine it is a very common practice for NixOS users to run emacs as a systemd service.

I also had errors in my .emacs many times and had no issues, until one day.

> I don't see your experience as a reason to not to do it this way.

That's fine. I simply offer it as a cautionary tale. It's possible that systemd on Nix handles things more gracefully than systemd on Arch (though it seems unlikely).

It sounds as if the problem was systemd instead of 'emacs --dameon'.

Yes, indeed. That's why I began with "Careful running emacs as a systemd service."

I'm glad I made the switch from Arch to Void. Runit is clean and simple, it does the correct job in a deterministic fashion, if something fails proper errors appear on usual logs.

I've shifted my work desktop and work laptop to Void, partially for similar reasons. Home desktop is on Arch still though, for various reasons.

When I meant customization, I didn't mean the availability of plugins. I meant the ability to change everything, and do it myself simply and quickly if needed, from within the editor itself.

There's only two editors I know that give you that, Emacs and Atom.

That said, I didn't try neovim, but it just seems like Vim with Lua plugins. Kinda similar to how Sublime Text can have Python plugins.

I agree: Vim is really held back by its reliance on default keymaps. Sure, you can remap them, but they are still the lifeblood of what Vim is. You can't change what they are.

Even emacs has this problem: there is a general set of consistent keymaps that are set by a wide variety of emacs modes. It's certainly not a trivial task to change, or get rid of them.

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