The real reason, why you switched is because you've been secretly manipulated by a subliminal message hidden in a vim DSA: http://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/2007/msg00126.html

If you read the first letter of every sentence of the advisory text it reads "Use Emacs". I'm glad that it worked :-)

Cheers, Moritz

Oy Moritz, writing DSAs is not supposed to be that much fun! --Joey


I'll be following this closely. Your first part didn't contain any arguments, but basically justified your writing about it. To put it differently: I didn't see a single reason to use emacs in your post, but I am also someone who doesn't care about GUI clients at all. There is vim --remote, which alleviates all your memory consumption and startup time concerns.

I hope you'll go more technical in future posts, giving good examples of what vim can't do but emacs can. I also hope you'll find some things that go the other way and write about them.

Anyway, it'll be a shame to see you go. I always appreciated your effort on vim and the help I got from you!

-- madduck


I'll be following this closely. Your first part didn't contain any arguments, but basically justified your writing about it. To put it differently: I didn't see a single reason to use emacs in your post

That's correct.

FWIW, it was intended to be so.

The first post was probably directed to myself, to remember what were the showstoppers in the past, which now have been solved. There are other two main points (for the future) I'll be discussing. The first one is precisely what you said: the glitches of Vim which were becoming too annoying, and which IMO are better addressed by Emacs. The other one is how I did the migration, for future reference.

Stay tuned.

-- Zack


Hi, I want from my text editor 1 feature: "Virtual editing" (vim :set ve=all) Free editors that have it are: fte, vim, kate. From commercial ones i know "visual slick edit" support it. I try emacs many times but still don't know does it support "virtual editing" ? If yes, i give emacs another try :)

djadala


I can't help quoting an exchange between me and jamessan from #debian-vim:

(15:48:46) jamessan: zack: after you finish your series of blog posts, I may have to give emacs a try again ; - )

-- Zack


About this blog post (i.e., trackbacks, ... by hand!):

-- Zack


Hi Zack.

Thank you for the interesting article on your recent switch to Emacs. I'm a relatively new Vim user (~1 year) who switched from TextMate[1], but I keep an eye on what long time users of both editors are saying to learn what I can. I have a few questions for you regarding this article.

  1. You mentioned a lack of good "modern" UI toolkit support, by which you seem to imply client. You did mention gVim, but not Cream. Have you tried it? Which Emacs client are you using?

  2. Something that seems a little odd about Emacs to me is that you need weird plugins to show line numbers. Did you find this cumbersome during your switch?

  3. Colour schemes. Vim's got 'em, and Emacs doesn't seem to have as many (AFAIK). Was this an issue for you?

I look forward to the rest of the series.

Thank you for your time,

James

[1] Short version of the story: TextMate is a screen real estate hog, and I was relegated to my 13" Macbook's screen for a while. MacVim to the rescue! I also needed a good environment that I could use on Windows, my Mac and our Linux box at work. I had tried Emacs in the past, loved SLIME, but couldn't keep all the key combos in my head. Vim seemed more natural.


  1. You mentioned a lack of good "modern" UI toolkit support, by which you seem to imply client. You did mention gVim, but not Cream. Have you tried it? Which Emacs client are you using?

There seems to be a popular misunderstanding about my blog post; nevertheless the post text is clear. I haven't written (yet) why I've switched, but only why I wasn't able to switch in the past. As a consequence I've no problem at all with Vim clients, they are "modern" in the sense used in the post. Simply, the Emacs client in the past was not "modern", now they are. The comparison was among old Emacs and current Emacs, by no means among Vim and Emacs clients (yet).

  1. Something that seems a little odd about Emacs to me is that you need weird plugins to show line numbers. Did you find this cumbersome during your switch?

I never had the need of showing line numbers in the text buffer. I do use line numbers showing the current cursor position though. Each time I heard about line numbers in the text buffer I've the feeling that people are missing some more high level command. For example, when compiling and browsing to compilation errors, I don't care about compilation error line numbers, I use an editor command which interpret them and jump to them directly, without me intermediating.

Even when there is no such integration, to go to a given line, I use an editing command which jumps directly to that line, without caring about readling lines on the screen and go to the appropriate place. Why else do you need printed line numbers?

  1. Colour schemes. Vim's got 'em, and Emacs doesn't seem to have as many (AFAIK). Was this an issue for you?

Actually Vim color schemes was bothering me. They are for eye-candiness, but then you need to find the one which highlights properly both with dark and light background, and in my experience ain't easy (my final choice was elflord IIRC). With Emacs the default one is just fine, maybe it is not terribly sexy, but highlighted code is readable both with light and dark backgrounds, and that's enough for me.

-- Zack


Zack--

First of all, I just wanted to thank you for the tone of the initial post, I think the first part of this series was absolutely a perfect way to start, and I am excited to see the follow up articles.

I have tried emacs myself off and on over the years, and just never got over the pain of the initial few days. I will be very interested to see how you got through it.

For the record, I enjoy my theme-candy and line numbers. Line numbers are very useful in pair programming and code review, IMHO.

-- MetaCosm


I switched from vim to emacs some times ago. It was becouse emacs has a po-mode to edit translations, sgml-mode and nxml-mode to edit SGML, HTML and XML, gdb integration... so I am now trying to use emacs even for email and expecially for GTD with org-mode.

-- StefanoCanepa


I read your Vim to Emacs post. It's interesting. I have this weird relationship with Emacs. In theory I love it, in practice I use Vim. I give Emacs another shot every six months or so, but I still keep switching back. You and I agree on many of the same reasons.

I look forward to your next post. If you're not too busy, take a peek at my blog post here http://jjinux.blogspot.com/2008/03/vim-why-i-like-vim.htmlincluding my comments. There are some things that Vim does so easily that Emacs doesn't that simply drive me nuts. They've always prevented me from making the switch before. I'd love your comments, but, again, only if you have time.

Best Regards, -- jj


Great Post here. I'm a through and through emacs enthusiast. I've tried vim, on and off, over the years, but I just can't seem to get the hang of it. Emacs on the other hand, is much more intuitive for me. Looking forward to the rest of the posts!

~vedang


is there any guide to make the jump from vim to emacs ? considering that I used vim for the last mm 10 years and never open emacs a part from when the info command didn't exsists

p.s. this is the dumbest comment method I've ever used

cheers


No, this is not flame. I'm actually converting to emacs as well (been a tough 3 days so far! :)

But when I was using vim I was extensively using its remote/server feature. So I know it exists, and was pretty fast. ( http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2008/10/from_Vim_to_Emacs-part_1/ 2nd paragraph from the end).

Cheers for the writeup though, I liked it.