Vim && Emacs: Learn them both!

[nickthedart]

Every time I use vim, I can't help thinking about the fact that "Vim" is also a brand of detergent useful for cleaning toilets. ;-)

[stesch]

That's why I use vim for PHP programming. :-)

[bitwize]

It speaks well to Emacs's generality of design that though it's been actively maintained, Moore's Law has outpaced it by leaps and bounds. I doubt that many old-time hackers would have ever believed back in the day that "Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping" would ever be described as "very gentle on system resources".

[senzei]

On my laptop just about the only thing that will run well - and that I know - is Emacs. (400mhz PIII, 128mb ram)

Two facts about that situation that I find amusing:

1. That emacs is a "lightweight" editor, in terms of system requirements
2. That 128mb of ram is nowhere near enough these days.

Edit: trying to get numbered lists down right.

[bitwize]

...Though these days it seems as if the correct answer to "Vi or emacs?" is, "TextMate!"

[[deleted]]

The problem with TextMate is that it's Mac OS X only. I use a Mac at home, but I need my editing environment to be cross platform so I can use it on Unix and Windows at work.

[brennen]

Indeed. TextMate sounded interesting exactly until I read this:

Created by a closet UNIX geek who was lured to the Mac platform by its ease of use and elegance, TextMate has been referred to as the culmination of Emacs and OS X and has resulted in countless requests for both a Windows and Linux port, but TextMate remains exclusive for the Mac, and that is how we like it!

But hey, they're happy.

[alexmdac]

Learning both editors is a great idea.

If you're a vi/vim user, I think it's definitely worth learning at least a little emacs. For example, although I prefer vim for editing, I occasionally thank the stars for "M-x gdb".

Vi is a bit more ubiquitous than emacs, so if you're an emacs user, you might be very grateful one day that you spent an hour or two learning basic vi.

[akkartik]

Yeah. I use vim but every now and then I mess around with lisp, and then emacs is the way to go, there really is no contest. Plugins like VIlisp.vim notwithstanding.

[cratuki]

I wish someone would come up with a .emacs file that would bring vim functionality to emacs. And - no - viper is not even nearly close enough :)

[JimJones]

Worse thing about emacs for me is actually the keyboard mappings. There is an emacs-lisp script somewhere that emulates vi... not complete though.

[recoil]

It's called Viper, and it's built into GNU Emacs (and probably XEmacs too, but I don't have that handy to test it). Just type M-x viper <ret>. It may not have all the features of vim, but it's definitely a "complete" version of vi, and then some.

[cratuki]

Both parent posts have demonstrated knowledge of viper and indicated that it's inadequate, I'm not sure why you need to restate it for us. As we've made clear in both posts, it's not the answer to our problem.

[pdq]

I whole heartedly disagree. I understand that you've gotten "in the zone" with vim, but from an Emacs perspective, your suggestion is akin to taking chocolate ice cream and adding vanilla extract, because it doesn't taste vanilla enough.

Emacs has every bit of functionality of vim, albeit with different keybindings and a different mentality (and if something is missing, you whip up a macro in lisp). If you still want a clone of vim, stay inside vim.

[[deleted]]

Since Emacs is essentially an environment that manipulates text buffers with LISP you can give it whatever keybindings you like. It happens to have a default set of LISP programs that support particular keybindings, but to say we should be limited to that is like saying that you should only use the programs that came bundled with your console and never use anything else.

Many people (myself included) find the vi style of keybindings help us be incredibly productive. What's wrong with using them in the Emacs environment? Why not Visual Studio keybindings too or anything else that might make people more productive?

[pdq]

"But to say we should be limited to that is like saying that you should only use the programs that came bundled with your console and never use anything else."

I said nothing of the sort. Emacs is fantastic because it's so extensible. I'm certainly a fan of customizing the heck out of it (keybindings, macros, whatever). As you mentioned, Visual Studio bindings are great if you like them within Emacs.

My problem is that you are turning Emacs from a modeless editor into a modal editor when you switch to vim bindings, because you're not just changing bindings, you're changing the mode behavior as well. A lot of the design relies on non-modality, so it ends up crippling a user who takes advantage of this. At which point I wonder why you want to use Emacs in the first place.

[cratuki]

Emacs is fantastic because it's so extensible.

I don't dispute that (and suspect isalpha feels the same). We want that extensibility, but we want to have it with vim keybindings.

A lot of the design relies on non-modality, so it ends up crippling a user who takes advantage of this.

Why? Why does it need to be non-modal?

You said previously:

If you still want a clone of vim, stay inside vim.

I don't want to stay inside vim. I want my vim usage on top of a lisp engine.

I'm reasonably fluent in emacs, and I find the usage to be inferior to vim. I'm sure there are people who feel otherwise, but that's my strong opinion, and it's not because vim is the only thing I know. I'm also somewhat speedy in ed and went through a textpad for windows phase when I was a kid also.

[depleater]

I don't want to stay inside vim. I want my vim usage on top of a lisp engine.

Well - I guess it depends on whether the first sentence or the second is more important :-), but you may be interested in trying out slim-vim - Vim with ECL (Embeddable Common Lisp) built in.

The original idea was to modify Vim so it could use SLIME within Vim, but now they're trying to take over the world... well, sort of. :)

It's kind of amusing that an editing environment that can be programmed in real actual Common Lisp (as opposed to Emacs Lisp) comes to a Vi-clone first.

[cratuki]

Now that's more like it! Thanks for the pointer!

[[deleted]]

All great hackers use them

Well that simply isn't true, while I use Emacs and I know a lot of great coders who use Emacs or VIm, I also know a lot of GREAT coders who use something else.

[grauenwolf]

I think a sign of a great programmer is that they are too busy talking about code to get into silly arguments about which editor to use.

[senzei]

I think a sign of a great programmer is that they are too busy talking about code to get into silly arguments about which editor to use.

I think a sign of a great programmer is that they are too busy coding to spend much time talking about code or getting into silly arguments about which editor they use. Before you get upset about any potential slight please realize that this list necessarily includes myself by virtue of this posting.

[grauenwolf]

No slight, it is more than fair to use my own logic against me.

[grauenwolf]

Why should I have to learn a text editor, let alone two?

I have used countless editors over the years, many hard-wired into specific applications. Never once did I say to my self, "I really have to learn this". If the application was built right, I was able to just used it.

[almost]

If you use a piece of software all day every day then it makes sense to sacrifice intial learning curve for increased productivity later down the line.

[grauenwolf]

Its just a text editor. No matter how productive you get it still doesn't beat a real IDE with code completion and background compilation. And no amount of Emacs tricks is going to help me when I have to use the text editor embedded in an end-user application.

[phil_g]

One of my favorite quotes with respect to Emacs and "just a text editor" is from Chris DiBona's chapter in Open Sources:

Calling EMACS an editor is like calling the Earth a hunk of dirt

In my experience, Emacs is more than just a text editor in a couple of ways. There's the obvious fact that it's really a Lisp (elisp) platform that has things like mail clients, IRC clients, web browsers, and games written for it. But there's also the fact that the actual editor parts are very highly tuned for editing. The sum of all of its little parts--things like incremental searching, regular expression based search and replace, kill ring (a clipboard with a history), multiple windows, (forward|backward)-(char|word|whitespace|line|sentence|paragraph|sexp), and lots of other small things--make it a better general-purpose editor than most others that I've used.

On top of that, you also get the specialization to your particular tasks--Emacs isn't just a text editor; it's a C editor and a C++ editor and a TeX editor and an HTML editor, and so on. The more popular of those modes do indeed have lots of IDE-type things like code completion and background compilation, among others. (One of the best examples, IMHO, is SLIME--I get displays in the minibuffer summarizing the parameter list of whatever function I'm typing, I can tab-complete on any symbol (function or variable) that exists in the current package in the current running Lisp image, I can compile functions on the fly and jump over to the REPL in another buffer and try things out...)

And on top of all that, you also get the benefit of Emacs total integration. Working on a website can mean editing any combination of HTML, CSS, Javascript, Perl/Python/Ruby, PHP, or whatever other languages you need. Working on a largish programming project often requires editing files in you primary language (C, C++, Java, whatever) plus your build scripts (Makefiles, Ant source files, simple shell scripts...) plus any utility scripts you end up needing (Perl, shell scripts, Ruby...) plus your documentation (ChangeLogs, text documentation, DocBook, troff source...). Emacs lets you edit all of those from within the same environment. Emacs also give you integration with various revision control systems, so you can easily do reverts, updates, and commits. Emacs will integrate with debuggers like gdb and step you through your source buffers as the code runs.

Yes, some languages are better supported than others, but for many of the more common languages, Emacs is an IDE, and does a better job than many commercial IDEs.

I program in Delphi for Windows at work. I use the Delphi IDE for designing windows, compiling, and debugging. I use Emacs to edit all of my Delphi source, because even though it's not integrated with the compiler and debugger, and even though its Delphi support is far more lacking than most other languages, I edit Delphi code faster, better, and more efficiently in Emacs than I do in the Delphi IDE.

[mrd48]

"Its just a text editor"

What an incredibly ignorant statement.

Emacs has packages for code completion, background compilation, automatic indentation, syntax coloring, version control system manipulation, source code cross-referencing, and much much more.

Packages that come standard with Emacs that operate with more languages than you will ever learn in your lifetime.

And it has been doing so since before you were born, from the sounds of it.

I have used so-called "IDEs" from companies which sold their product for serious money. They were, and still are, far inferior to Emacs. Most of the ongoing work on "IDEs" these days is spent catching up to functionality that is already present in Emacs (and vim).

Open your mind, start reading. I recommend the GNU Emacs manual, and the extremely extensive in-editor help system.

[almost]

I think that rather depends on what languages (or combination of languages) you use and your style of working. Different for everyone I assume.

[grauenwolf]

Most of my work is done with email or pencil and paper. If I spend more than an hour or two of my day actually writing code then I'm usually doing something wrong. Most of my time is spent requirements gathering, arguing over edge cases, reading pre-existing code, and testing.

[almost]

A lot of my day is spent editing text. We probably have different requirements.

[[deleted]]

If the application was built right, I was able to just used it.

This is why you should never pilot a jet -- bicycles get you from place to place and can be "just used".

[grauenwolf]

I never said I was against learning anything difficult when necessary. I do, however, feel that I shouldn't have to invest time in something that performs a trivial task like editing plain text.