> the wisdom that "Emacs is a good operating system, it just needs a decent text editor".
that's not wisdom; that's a sarcastic quip by the vim side of the emacs-vim/vim-emacs religious war.
that's not wisdom; that's a sarcastic quip by the vim side of the emacs-vim/vim-emacs religious war.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs#Emacs_pinky
As a novice Vim user who has at times wanted to try out Emacs, this has always been an irritation. I think it's telling that one of the suggested work-arounds according that article is:
> Emacs' built-in "Viper-mode" that allows use of the vi key layout for basic text editing and the Emacs scheme for more advanced features.
Emacs, especially with paredit, is fairly well optimised for editing s-expressions and the like. Vim is very well optimised for line-based editing, but I don't get on with its buffer management at all.
> underline an arbitrary line of text with '=' characters. In vim that's 11 keypresses across 3 operations
YpVr=
For those that are interested, I would recommend "Practical Vim", and it includes many examples (including the above one) which really accelerate the learning process:
http://pragprog.com/book/dnvim/practical-vim
There are definitely cheaper alternatives (including free ones), but this book really laid the concepts out very clearly for me.
I use Emacs to edit text, and I have limbs I'd rather lose than have to perform that task with Vim's airbag in my face.
Vim and Emacs both use key combinations... Vim's just require fewer fingers at once. You type Vim key combinations as you would type words in a language with a latin alphabet.
The key however is understanding that if you are insertion mode, then key sequences start with the escape key, or, insertion commands are completed with the escape key. There is no "context switching". No more-so then having to press ctrl along with the rest of your key sequence in Emacs is "context switching".