Ask HN: How you decided which text editor to use and sink time into?

1 points by Philipp__ 9y ago ↗ HN

First let me say, DO NOT START FLAME WAR! That is not why I am here, asking for your help. If you want to read more in-depth about my dilemma see my medium post:

https://medium.com/@PhilippMiletic/editor-s-c3ba97f31ca1

So what is really driving me crazy is that I am stuck between emacs and vim. I have both of them installed and whenever I stick with one for a week, I feel like I miss the other one. For Example I use emacs for a week, great, enjoy using it, but I kinda miss vim. So eight day I open Vim and feel like wow, I see all the things I like it, and try, stick with it for a week and thing repeats it self, and after few days I swing back to emacs. And it is irritating because I cannot learn both things at the same time.

I was using vim for 3 years, liked it (except viml and configuring) a lot, and I like to throw myself out of the comfort zone so I tried Emacs because I read a lot about it. And I used it for 4 months, and now I switch between these two every one in a while. Long term Emacs seem like much better investment, it is amazing platform actually, where plugins feel like whole environments, while Vim is so much better for editing text and my flow was pretty good with iTerm2+zsh+neovim, but plugins are just like that plugins, nothing special about them (where in Emacs land you have magit, ENSIME, CIDER, CEDET). And I dipped my toes into Lisp, so Emacs is built for that. But when I want to go write some C, and get things done I go back to neovim and do it. So I am aware of good and bad sides of both editors, neither is better, philosophies behind them are different.

What are the things that made you decide and pull the trigger of one of those?

I am really picky about my tools, and people say I am config freak, but I just like to tweak things. I enjoy spending my free time by tweaking things that make no to little difference when you look at them by themselves, but after I look at bigger picture I can see I am learning and having fun.

5 comments

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mweilgart 9y ago ↗

If you are a sysadmin (which you clearly are not), there isn't much of a choice—vi is available on every server you will ever log in to, even in single user mode and even on embedded devices, whereas emacs generally is not.

For developers, the decision is more preference-based than spurred by necessity.

mweilgart 9y ago ↗

You might find the xkcd fora thread on the subject good reading; despite the "religious wars" forum title, there are a number of well-reasoned arguments for both sides: http://fora.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=14943

Pete_D 9y ago ↗

If you can't choose between them, what do you think about the vi-emulation modes for emacs, like evil-mode?

Philipp__ 9y ago ↗

I was limited to 2k chars in my initial post, but I knew this question will come. I do not like that. And let me explain why, at least for now!

As of this moment, I do not consider myself vim expert, but I know my way around it. Enough that I felt really comfortable using it. So you could say I am average Vim user. Know few commands, chording, moving around without keys etc etc. And after that I struggled with Emacs keybindings, since I finally understood philosophy under Vim. I installed Evil in Emacs and wow, I didn't expect it to be that good! And it is an option, but not for now. Not for few years, until I become just as (or even more) comfortable in Emacs than I am now in Vim. Because for few weeks I used Vim I found my self using commands from Vim mixed with commands from Emacs, to do particularly the same thing. And it would be like using some third editor. I think I cannot forget Vi keybinding that easily, it feels like it's riding the bike. So I was thinking lately, and most likely scenario is that I will stick with Emacs. It will hurt now, but it will get better over time! My guts tell me I won't regret it and that it will pay off much more than Vim. So I will basically follow the guts. And after time spent with vanila emacs I think I could jump into Evil If I steel feel the need for vim bindings and modal editing. I just think I got used to it a lot.

dwc 9y ago ↗

I used emacs at a very basic level for many years, and then I switched to vim and I was very happy. The way of vi fit me so much better than all the chords with emacs. I used vim for about 10 years. Lately I've transitioned back to emacs, because VimL/VimScript or whatever you call it is a nightmare, and I began looking into org mode in emacs and I wanted it very much.

So I installed emacs with evil, got into a place where vi key bindings didn't work and I was stuck. So I turned off evil and stuck with normal emacs for a while. Until I knew I wouldn't be stuck if I got thrown out of vi key bindings. Then I turned evil mode back on.

No need to wait a year or more. Just Get a basic familiarity with plain emacs and then switch to evil. You get the best of both worlds.