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

[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.

[zstg@fedia.social]

@hell I've never used Vm in any major capacity, but Emacs is capable of doing so much more than Vim. Much of my workflow depends on #Emacs. While I can (and rarely do) use other editors, none of them come close to #Emacs.

And in any cases where I work remotely, I don't need Vim on the remote. I simply use TRAMP and enjoy my Emacs config everywhere, without setting up Emacs on each machine. Can't imagine *Vim users doing the things us Emacsians enjoy.

PS: I'm a rather heavy Evil user btw.

[ross@social.rossabaker.com]

@hell Picked up Emacs in college. Switched to Vim because it was better emulated in the bloated IDEs I had to use early in my career. When I dropped those IDEs, came back to Emacs because it emulated Vim with better extensibility. And then I finally dropped the emulation. I came full circle.

[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.