My Journey from Vim to Emacs
pspiagicw
Posted on December 4, 2020
A Kingdom of Vim:Vimdom
I was a astute vim user for the last 5 years. I read hundreds of books on Vim and Neovim . Saw every last screencast of Drew Neil and worshipped Tim Pope and Junnegun . I followed closely with the neovim repository . Experimented with making my perfect neovim config . Tried Spacevim and multiple distributions of vim just for getting the feel of a complete config of vim . Spent atleast 5 hours per week on making Vim more efficient .
Living in the Vimdom.
The biggest thing that I hated was that I could not live in vim. I tried living in the terminal so that I could run my life from a terminal. Tried running st(terminal) as a the only root window in Xorg so that I could run every software inside Vim with the terminal emulator integrated into it. You could say I was mostly successfully . But there some thing's that always bugged me . Vim was implemented as a text editor it only succeeds as a text editor. The way everything is implemented it just makes sense for efficiency and speed.
My Views
After much thought I saw the idea behind Vim . It was not a text editor . It was a editing racer.It was build so that you just race through whatever you were editing.It was not build as a environment.It was not build as a way of life.It was build to fit in your life . Not become your life.
A Forgotten Ruin.
I thought about using emacs as a text editor for a while and tried and failed to adopt it as a text editor multiple times . My pinky finger pained for multiple days after using emacs for a week.I could not imagine using it for my life. But I knew about Doom Emacs from Distrotube's video and decided to try it as a text editor.I failed again because of my habit to open everything in neovim by typing nvim in the terminal.I decided to move to vim again but I did not delete the Doom Emacs configuration.I just kept it in my home folder.
A lost treasure.
Distrotube posted a video about how exwm could make Emacs your window manager.I was quite intrigued by that and decided to try it. So I installed Emacs Again but due to my Doom Emacs config already there I was happy that I did not have to install anything.I just moved to ExWM.And after a week of using it.I cannot tell how happy I am.The joy of using absolutely one software for everything is phenomenal.I don't think I would switch atleast for a few months.It has been a month since I have typed 'nvim' in a terminal.I have uninstalled everything except the base necessary and Emacs.I am writing this post in emacs.
My Summary.
If you are not able to adapt to the Emacs world . It would be good to switch to EXWM as this forces you to literally live in emacs.I would tell that Emacs as a editor is not efficient and definately not speedy.But Hell Yeah!It is convenient for everything I do.
Drop you comments below on your editor journey. And let us discuss about it.
Posted on December 4, 2020
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