people who have gone from neo/VI/m to Emacs or wise verse - what made you swap?

[windofchange@mastodon.online]

@hell i've come to terms that i will never use emacs. i tried swutching to it numerous times. decided it is actually better to live my life and go outside.

[ssekret@infosec.exchange]

@hell I wanted to try EXWM with emacs, because I felt like it's a cool way to navigate WM, but my pinky finger started to hurt from navigating emacs, overall I think you need to press too many buttons to navigate emacs. I know I can install dark emacs, but what is there point then...

[erikarn@mstdn.social]

@hell needing to be fluent with /an/ editor on /any/ system. Back in the old days you barely had consistent versions / behaviour of vi on unix, let alone binary vim packaging.

So as a sysadmin fixing/building stuff i optimised for "anywhere anytime."

Now it's vi/vim with no plugins, as for the kernel/driver stuff I do the plugins get in the way, and vscode/neovim/etc end up making the "minimum productive consistent setup across devices' increasingly complicated and unstable.

[fpccraig@mastodon.social]

@hell Dating myself a bit here. I think I literally learned (was taught) ed first because it (being the standard text editor) was the only thing you could count on being there. Vi next, and then my tech mentor/schoolmate said “Learn emacs; it’ll take a while, but it’s worth it.” He also later said “I use vi for files I don’t want to change the ownership of.” So I do that, too. Reasonably comfortable (and continue to learn) with both, but if I’m going to be writing a lot, I’ll use emacs.

[drj@typo.social]

@hell I used Emacs pretty solidly for a couple of years. It's fun. Lovely programming environment. It's own elisp mode has fond nostalgic aura. I picked up vi (true vi, on SunOS) and I just preferred the editor. I was never big into customisation. Went through vim, then neovim (less default colours); now I'm on nvi, which I build myself from source.

For vi, I would highly recommend Lamb's Learning the vi Editor, 5th edition.

[ki@chaos.social]

@hell
emacs being a Lisp REPL made me swap, as soon as I realized I could get everything I'm used to with vim inside emacs using `evil-mode`, with unlimited possibility for customization

now, I don't want to miss `org-mode`, babel and
emacs calc anymore

[ki@chaos.social]

@Netzblockierer @hell
not even vim is safe anymore? fuck

[numberthirtyfour@mastodon.me.uk]

@hell
I was a Vim user for years, then dabbled in Emacs. At the time I was writing very long documents in Latex. Both editors were great. Then in Emacs I discovered M-x occur <regex>. At that time I could not have found anything more useful. Now I'm an Emacs user who dabbles in Vim. They're both still great.

[tfb@functional.cafe]

@hell I started with vi when I learned Unix because that was the Unix environment. I eventually tried Emacs because it promised to give me a C programming environment that was competitive with Borland's Turbo products; it absolutely did not, but it was closer at least than the classic Unix programming environment.

Perl and Lisp and LaTeX and HTML all continued to push me into Emacs, which eventually became my everything editor. Except for random sysadmin tasks where I still often use vi out of old habit.

[zenie@piaille.fr]

@hell 50 years ago Emacs wasn't yet available. Vi is standard on all unix systems.

I switched to Emacs in 1995 because I worked at a place that had a huge Emacs base. 1000s of devs, a huge company wide package archive.

I used viper mode for a long time. While using vi in a terminal for small things.

Aside from being able to cycle either direction through buffers in Vim, I never liked Vim, vimscript or the developer.

I briefly tried vim in 2010.
It just didn't compare to Emacs. I started using Evil when it came out. The last couple of years I turned off Evil and eventually settled into Meow mode.

Whatever you need in Emacs is just a bit of code away.

[fffluoride@mathstodon.xyz]

@hell I "learned" vim improperly but got used to it, then I was mad I had gotten used to subpar editing. I didn't want to learn vim keybindings (I don't know them to this day), so I learned emacs because I heard it was more intuitive.

[fl3x0@infosec.exchange]

@hell I've started with vim ~10 years ago, because it was available on nearly every server I had to work with.

Learning emacs now, because I like elisp, I need a change and learning new stuff is fun.

[fl3x0@infosec.exchange]

@numberthirtyfour @hell

That's a nice feature!

[hikari@ohai.social]

@hell Emacs felt easier to use with Lisp and all over Lua. The NeoVim ecosystem is very large and figuring out how to do things well isn't all that easy. Moreover I just found the Emacs binds nicer to work with than Vim

[diegovsky@fosstodon.org]

@zstg @hell

I've tried emacs for a bit but after using Helix for quite some time, I just can't get used to the latency of Emacs.

Helix's commands are immediate (except they call to the LSP server, but it's still almost like it). I often felt some jank with Emacs, especially starting up.

And I used emacsclient too.

[smacintyre@mastodon.social]

@hell In the process of switching from NeoVim to Emacs because the infection of NeoVim and Vim with slop. So far so good. Though wish Emacs was more terminal friendly.

My journey: nvi (old unix vi clone) -> vim -> neovim -> emacs

[randyridenour@zirk.us]

@hell I think VIM keyboard navigation is like magic, but for some reason, modal editing just doesn’t fit with the way my brain works. I went to Emacs and never seriously looked back.

[bogosity@im-in.space]

@hell
I learned vi when I got into UNIX in the 80s, but quickly switched to emacs once I found out about it. I ran emacs for 20+ years on a variety of OSes, until I moved to an environment where I wasn't allowed to install it on the thousands of servers that we ran. At that point I took up vi again, and I was at that job long enough that I lost the emacs habit. I'd probably still love emacs if I could ramp myself back up, but I doubt my configs from the early 2000s would still work OOB, and emacs is all about your personal workflow.

[pkw@snac.d34d.net]

I switch back and forth between vi and emacs.
Vi is nice if you are into "Unix IS the IDE".
It starts instantly. You use the shell for shell
things.

Emacs is nice to do EVERYTHING in.
When I use emacs I leave it running for
days. It's especially nice for programming
any kind of lisp.

Emacs is definitely more of an ideal for using
as a pure programming editor, but i have
become more and more unix pilled so I
tend to use vi more lately.

An example is auto formatting. Emacs is great
at this IN the editor. Press tab and emacs will
do the correct thing indent wise.

In vi I have to find an external program
that formats (like gofmt or indent) and
pipe the buffer contents out to that
program and back. This is made easier
by using map commands to map keys
to do the indenting. But shows how emacs
and vi differ basically.

[dekkzz78@ruby.social]

@hell

org-mode