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

[noplasticshower@infosec.exchange]

@hell emacs or die

[mirabilos@toot.mirbsd.org]

@hell ITYM “vice versa”

(cannot comment on that because I… know how to quit Emacs… and… ok I know more vi than half my vim-using coworkers at ${dayjob[-1]}… but I’d rather use ed(1) (unironically) or jupp or mcedit if it must… so neither were ever really an option for me)

[zygmyd@toot.cat]

@hell

Some years ago I needed to keep password strings readable so I could type them into remote UIs and pasting from Password Gorilla wasn't an option the way all this was set up. I couldn't use anything that wrote temp files (management requirement, regardless of whether the software could be configured to write temp files). I recalled that emacs buffers were not written to disk and used emacs for that stuff. Things predictably grew from there.

[lhp@mastodon.social]

@hell vim->kakoune->emacs

The realisation that editing efficiency is mostly worthless. In emacs I have well designed UI/UX for all tasks beyond pure text editing, which is much more valuable.

F.e. I can create a custom documentation viewer with code generation from XML files in like thirty minutes, which integrates natively with all other emacs features. Or inspect DBus messages.

It's like a shell, but instead of a CLI prompt you have a hypertext interface and a saner language.

[scm@sfba.social]

@hell @catsalad I first learned vi before vim was around, and I’ve always used vi/vim for like system administration type edits

I switched to Emacs for code mostly becuse it did syntax highlighting, but also had more programming freatures than old school vi. (I always used vi emulation mode for search and replace in emacs )

I used vim for a while later, and then eventually moved to TextMate and then SublimeText. I’ve been fine with either vim or Emacs, though it takes me a while to get in the hang of using the right commands TM and Sublime are both support some of the weird emacs key commands I remember

[octorine@fosstodon.org]

@hell The grass is always greener

[zippywonderdust@mastodon.social]

@hell Emacs is the devil. Vim for life!

(More reasonably, I learned vi very early in my career on SCO Unix and once it became muscle memory, Emacs didn’t have a chance. Also, vi is usually either already installed or easily available on even the tiniest of *nix systems, which keeps me in practice to this day.)

[ojrac@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@hell I started with vim arbitrarily, switched to emacs ~6 years later because a friend was really talked up org mode. After a few months (3-12?) I went back to vim because my wrist pain was coming back.

[drwho@masto.hackers.town]

@hell I started with pico because I used Pine as my mail client for many years. Then I had to fix a bunch of hosed SCO UNIX boxen and the only text editor they had was vi. So I learned vi.

No matter what box I'm on, it has vi (even as a mask of BusyBox).

[netzblockierer@tech.lgbt]

@hell i moved to EVi because vim & neovim got enshittfiied with AIslop-Code.

#EVi #neovim #AIslop #AI #SlopCode #enshittfication cation

[gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafe]

@hell while it was a very brief stint with Emacs many years ago (around the turn of the century), I got frustrated by ① the lack of power in a default install leading to annoyances with copying configs around to various machines, and ② the lack of ubiquity…I could sit down at any Unix-like machine and type `vi` (and at the time `ed`) and be editing immediately, but if I typed `emacs`, sometimes it was there, oftentimes not, and rarely configured the same way. So after some brief poking at Emacs I ended up in the ed/vi/vim camp due to its omnipresence.

[purple@nya.social]

@hell@defcon.social i left the "editor wars" 20 years ago. the only winning move is to not play.

i use micro if i get a choice in the matter btw. but any editor will do when shit's on fire, and it usually is.

[jayalane@mastodon.online]

@bignose @hell I use vim to edit files under /etc for tradition’s sake (except my DNS zone files, where eMacs auto increments the serial number while my vim does not).

[hell@defcon.social]

@noplasticshower a true warrior!

[hell@defcon.social]

@ZippyWonderdust my sports team is better than your sports team!

[hell@defcon.social]

@octorine oof too soon
-distrohopper

[crwx@hachyderm.io]

@hell I use both, but I use Emacs mostly. vim is mostly for editing files quickly in and out. I haven't learnt how to resolve merge conflicts in Emacs so vimdiff is still my go-to. I don't need neovim, vim is sufficient.

[dianea@lgbtqia.space]

@hell

vi is lightweight and fits neatly into every embedded computing environment. Vi is encoded into our genetics of every living cell.

[miss_rodent@girlcock.club]

@hell I didn't so much "swap" as learned both? First moving over to unix-ey OSes I found emacs easier to learn at least the basics of, but, vi-likes are installed by default in basically everything so picked up the basics but didn't really like most of them, and mainly used emacs for anything significant for a while, decided to finally learn vi properly after looking at elvis (slackware's default vi-clone), I still use both (emacs, elvis), pretty much interchangeably

[anyia@lgbtqia.space]

@hell I was used to pico thanks to running pine as my mail client. I'd started learning emacs, but then at work it wasn't installed on my SunOS workstation, and I couldn't get it to compile. In the end I ran out of time and picked up more vi skills instead. That turned out to be extra useful when I got an old 286 to use as a modem gateway, where even starting vi took a number of seconds - emacs would've been right out ("eight megs and constantly swapping" wouldn't have been far off the truth on that old machine)

I've stuck with vi/nvi/vim since, because whichever *nix flavour I'm on, it's always available. And once you make friends with it, it really is quick and easy to use. Plus I like the "one tool, one job" approach.