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Comment by 01100011 | Hacker News Reader

Choosing an editor like emacs or vi is a major decision which will have long-lasting effects. I love vi, and the homerow movement keys are now hard-wired into my brain, so much so that using 'normal' applications is noticeably frustrating. Sure, I can try to add plugins to everything, but that only goes so far and requires a lot of setup work on every new computer or VM. That said, the old school editors bring plenty to the table for programmers if you take the time to learn them well.

Honestly emacs sounds wonderful on many levels, but I learned vi first and I think that will keep me from ever switching. There's probably a vi-mode for emacs I guess... anyone have any comments on that?

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I’m also a long time vim user. I basically cannot edit text without vim keybindings these days.

A few weeks back I decided to give emacs a third try, after installing it once a while ago and giving up, installing it again with spacemacs a bit later and giving up when I couldn’t figure out what layer of that behemoth errors were coming from or how to fix them.

Anyway, I finally decided to give it another shot with vanilla, with the first thing to do being to get evil mode working (which is vim keybindings). Getting to that point was a struggle, honestly. I felt handicapped without vim bindings, and I ran into some errors downloading packages after I added MELPA to my .emacs file. After an hour or two, I managed to get evil mode going, and I guess just the little bit of familiarity in what was otherwise a VERY overwhelming and unfamiliar experience made everything feel much easier.

Getting to where it was easy to install and see the effects of new plugins one at a time rather than getting the massive overload of spacemacs was super helpful. It made the learning curve smoother for sure.

I mostly did all of this because I wanted to try org mode, and honestly that has been amazing. It’s a very very good way of taking notes and tracking tasks. I’ll probably spend some time next time I’m feeling like tinkering trying to get it more like an IDE, but for now I’m happy just with org mode.

That's how I settled things down finally, Emacs for org-mode and magit (actually spacemacs) synced with all my devices with syncthing, on mobile I use orgzly, and everything is under version control. I use Vim for everything else.

I was in your shoes about 2 weeks ago. I also learned vi first and have been using it regularly for a couple of years now but was curious about emacs. At home, I installed spacemacs which uses vi keybindings. For work due to some security stuff I went with vanilla emacs, with evil mode installed (evil also adds vi keybindings).

I spent 2 evenings picking it up and getting my dot files in order. I primarily wanted to use org mode and only use it for that at the moment, I’m still using vi for coding because of a vimrc that lets me navigate the code base at work really easily but org mode has made task tracking a joy and also it auto-prepares my agenda based on my org file. All in all, I’d say it’s a worth a shot and you also get to keep vi keybindings, which is nice.

Thanks, I might give that a shot. I just installed vim-orgmode to see if I could get a little emacs goodness in vimland. I usually use a custom markup language and vim syntax definitions to keep track of my notes, so this may get me to convert my notes to org mode.

The thing I'm most excited about is shell-mode. For years I've wanted to be able to drop to a shell in vim and visually cut/paste the window. From what I hear, emacs can handle that.

You might want to update your vim installation and check out `:help terminal`.

One thing I learned last year is to keep all my notes in markdown. I don't like it, I prefer my own markup, but many apps support it, which increases its usefulness a lot.

> For years I've wanted to be able to drop to a shell in vim and visually cut/paste the window.

NeoVim is 100% compatible and has a pretty decent terminal buffer with full (read-only) Vim controls. Nowadays I prefer running it in a terminal multiplexer though.

Emacs' terminal mode doesn't have ncurses support which leads to pretty much all interactive terminal applications to break.

There are a few shell modes in Emacs. I think ansi-term might do what you want for a full screen interactive terminal application.

I tried all 3 terminals I could find and none works. Apparently they all use the same ancient base that was developed before interactive terminal UIs were a thing.

ncurses programs absolutely do work with ansi-term, which is a terminal emulator. They don't work with eshell, which is not a terminal emulator.

I spent two weeks around last christmas seriously trying out and configuring Emacs as a Vim user, from the ground up. It took me those full two weeks to actually get to where I wanted.

So it is possible to get Emacs to (mostly) behave like Vim, but it includes installing a couple plugins, spending time to set many additional keyboard shortcuts(especially when you have an extensive .vimrc already) and also completely ripping out and replacing Emacs' automatic indentation functionality because I find its behaviour actively counterproductive.

My two cents are that if you're really comfortable with Vim's or Emacs' approach you may not like the other one, simply because their main difference is that approach to doing the exact same things. And the improvements will certainly not be proportional to the time invested.

I keep on typing :wd or :wqa on finishing whatever prompt I'm typing into.

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