What different before you were using emacs?

* i was unorganized -> org mode saved me there * i was constantly searching for the next "big" tool (evernote, onenote, you name it) -> i am lightyears ahead now, at least in my reality ;) * i was not sure, which IDE to use * i never regretted, how much time i wasted with other tooling * i never commited so much into one program, except starcraft, cs and lol ;) * i regretted to not have a closer look at it, when searching for vim vs emacs and most people would recommend vim to me. i do not regret using some vim, but i regret not to have closer looked at emacs. Emacs is like an interesting person you get to know and each time you are thrilled to know that person more and more. What was different or how did emacs change you?

I was younger.

Fact: my hair loss started _after_ I started using emacs

I never regretted the time I spent in my .emacs file

People thought I was normal before I start using emacs.

* I was using neovim. Now I flash my Emacs to unsuspecting strangers. * I hated my neovim configs. It was broken, outdated and involve lots of incomplete self-written configs. Now I rest easy on top of a distribution (spacemacs) * I hated vimscript and transitioning to lua was painful. Now I'm in love with Emacs lisp... Somehow lmao * I hated forcing neovim into an IDE when it's simply not very capable. I now use Emacs for my org notes, my IDE for various Lang's and environments, my git management suite, terminal/REPL and latex document processor. * I thought Emacs was kinda okay. Now I love Emacs but still wish the maintainers can iron out some of Emacs' sharper edges. * I was spending hours making neovim my beloved. Now I spend hours with Emacs, my beloved.

I prefer epub files over pdf. Slightly, just slightly.

I agree with your bullet points. When I was using Vim, I was frustrated quite often. Something was right in front of me, but I could not reach it. It was hard to keep an idea I came up with while I was using Vim. Everything had to be prepared *beforehand*. With Emacs, things are more incremental. You can tweak code bit by bit, `winner-mode` is nice, and `org-mode`. It makes me be more responsible.

Hair is bloat anyway

I wish I could be this positive about hairloss :(

I'm too busy tinkering with my dotfiles to worry about hair loss

Sort of share all those experiences you listed. I wonder how much different things would have been when writing my thesis, if I had written it in emacs + org-mode, instead of vim + restructuredtext. Perhaps I would have used the include functionality to include sections of my thesis. I used to use vim and switch windows often to do things like version control with git. Now I use magit inside emacs. I only switch away from emacs, when I need to look at some result of my work, for example a web page in the browser. The configuration language vimscript should be illegal. Elisp certainly has its weaknesses, but non close to the horrors of vimscript. Although I did manage to cope with that too, when I had to. I still do some things faster in vim, like for example delete up to character and such actions. But rarely these are the actions, which are a bottleneck, when writing software. Nevertheless doesn't hurt to display some vim skills every now and then : )

I now find random reasons to sneak Emacs into any conversation once it lightly broaches upon productivity and tooling topics. 🤣Didn't do that when I was using nvim. Also finding myself screensharing my note taking more during meetings (to keep folks in the loop) since I regained proficiency in Emacs. I (very openly perhaps, but I think "secretly") kick on the "so wow"'s that I can sense through the wire when I'm navigating trees of information. 😈 Definitely yapping too loudly and showing off more. 😅🤦🏿‍♂️ I'm a horrible 🙊 but enabled person in that sense.

You guys still have hair?

In all the wrong places, yes.

*casually brushes forehead*

I came from pre-vim vi, so: - compilation was done in the shell, and I had a scriptlet I could cut/paste an error message to, to open vi at the file/line - code had *no* syntax highlighting - The indentation engine was between keyboard and chair (with slight help from the *very* simplistic non-syntax-aware indent support in vi) - I made an external text justifying program I could pipe a selected comment region into and have it reformatted. Then I found that (better) in Emacs with `M-q`. There was *slightly* more bling and integration available with Sun's tooling at the time but the editor was pretty trivial, but they had (X)Emacs integration, including good debugging, that I jumped on. In hindsight, the fact that I was making aliases, functions and scripts to enrich and accelerate my environment makes it all too appropriate that I adopted Emacs almost 30 years ago.

I am happy (thanks doom emacs or I will never keep emacs) until..... I want to learn c++ + opengl.... It s hard to configure it with cpp17 and use build... I understand nothing... I don't want to spend more time understanding my tool :'(... Maybe... I... Should switch to some visual studio ?

I gained weight.

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Change your perspective. Now you're ready for global warming! (Just like me)

Minoxidil is a blood pressure drug known to cause heart complications. Worth it? Specially when it barely does anything for a significant portion of people? All medicine solutions suck. Finasteride can destroy libido. Best bet is probably to start saving money for HT in Turkey.

> I was spending hours making neovim my beloved. Now I spend hours with Emacs, my beloved. Hahahahah I can relate to this

b4: cd .. vim .. wq .. goto b4;

Agree with all your points. I was able to power through all the ways I thought I could increase my productivity, and often came to a superior setup much faster than I could have anticipated. Thank elisp.

It had the opposite effect on Protesilaos though

I'm big into emacs but I just can't abandon my notion setup for org. I use the relational database functionality just a bit too much and have a ton of custom dashboards. I do regret not owning my data so i need to figure something out in the future.

[nov.el](https://depp.brause.cc/nov.el/) is pretty nice, although [pdf-tools](https://github.com/politza/pdf-tools) makes PDFs tolerable.

Yeah but at the doses you lose for hair loss (2.5mg once or twice a day), it's safe. And the loss of libido can be mitigated by taking a smaller dose (even down to 0.125mg) or taking it topically. All under the guidance of a dermatologist. Getting a HT without taking Finasteride has its downsides too as hair loss will continue around the transplanted hair.

I was using a line editor. Emacs was the first screen editor I ever saw.

I was happy with imperfections of programming languages. Mind you, Emacs Lisp is hardly a perfect language, the amount of time I've spent writing macros... I've recently dialed it back a lot, because it often caused me to not understand my own code. (cl-labels ((doit () ...) ;; 50 functions ) (doit)) Make for fun back-traces :)

Lets see.. Emacs for me turned out to be better vim, The org mode.. helped me a lot with what to do each day, Consistent UI between many things is god send, Emacs for git, emacs as terminal, emacs as IDE, emacs as IRC Client, its just perfect.

whenever I am in "coding-mode" I find myself craving to use emacs keystrokes to edit it... like heck! i lost time on how many times I tried to use M-b M-d to delete a word in the Google chrome console

Stallman disapproves that notion.

> i lost time on how many times I tried to use M-b M-d to delete a word in the Google chrome console If you were on a Mac, that would work out of the box. :)

It was the dark ages.

Do you use vanila Emacs or Doom or Spacemacs?

I used to be annoyed with having to edit my Neovim config to do something I wanted it to do. There were also so many plugins that never really did what I wanted. Neovim was never really interactive enough, and while I guess the new Lua plugins help with that but it's not really the same.

Before I started using emacs Bill Clinton was president. So quite a lot has changes.

> I hated my neovim configs. It was broken, outdated and involve lots of incomplete self-written configs. **Now I rest easy on top of a distribution (*spacemacs*)**

Well, the world wide web didn't exist, yet. Nobody'd yet heard of Linux. 14,400 bps was a really fast modem. You could meet your family right at the airplane's gate. Quite a bit, really.

Sometimes you shave the yak; sometimes the yak shaves you.

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i'm using spacemacs now, since i find the layer system pretty close to what i'm looking for.

Before I was using Emacs, I had only an ASR-33 teletype and a 300 baud modem. Since then, everything has changed many times!

Used to make fun of my friends for using emacs, until my thesis advisor is an emacs user which made me become an emac user. Now I cant seem to stop tweaking it. Last program opened: emacs Last file edited: init.el

I use both

same situation, almost exactly. only difference is that I found my people about (network developers) the same time I locked in on emacs and org-mode.

I may be a bit weird, but I use nvim for code editing and emacs for documents. I tried to use emacs several times for writing code, but it was too buggy so I gave up. Org got closest to a usable document/presentation program out of everything I tried. I still have many issues with it, but it's pretty great. My NeoVim config is just a few lines You can config nvim with lisp Don't do that. Nvim is not an ide. You can make it into one, but I don't see a reason why you'd do that.

I don't think going bald would particularly help when its 40~50 C outside so I'd much rather still have my hair!

I was a high school student using notepad++ on Windows 7, so a lot has changed. And I'm definitely a latecomer to emacs. Someone here can probably say they got their first internet sub after learning emacs.

One more important thing: I was unemployed. I got a job after I started using Emacs. However, I was not allowed to install Emacs in my first job as a junior programmer/dev. They didn't totally understand my situation.

I meet lots of people and learn from them.

> I use nvim for code editing and emacs for documents. I tried to use emacs several times for writing code, but it was too buggy so I gave up. nah, it's not weird at all to use both emacs and neovim. i used noconfig neovim as my number two, in case emacs couldn't work for some reason. happened a couple times last year because packages break and i was in a hurry. who knows if it happens this year or no. > (neo)vim isn't an IDE. don't do that, i see no reason why you'd do that. (neo)vim tricks me into thinking it can provide it. it's always out of reach behind configs i need to write myself, so close to what i need, but never what i want. frankly, i'm sick of its limitations and capabilities, especially in UI/UX. > you can config neovim with lisp and write all the custom lisp sanity utilities, interop and configs myself? no, i want to work with my text editing suite, not work making a configuration framework for my text editing suite. that's why i went with a distribution in the first place. loving emacs lisp was just a happy coincidence, serendipity. there's spacevim, but it was still very early in development when it appeared on my radar. i wonder how the project is going nowadays. > my neovim config is just a few lines maybe you're satisfied with a simple text editor but i think i'll pass on that one, considering what i use emacs for.

> (neo)vim tricks me into thinking it can provide it. it's always out of reach behind configs i need to write myself, so close to what i need, but never what i want. frankly, i'm sick of its limitations and capabilities, especially in UI/UX. I haven't encountered any major limitations. > and write all the custom lisp sanity utilities, interop and configs myself? no, i want to work with my text editing suite, not work making a configuration framework for my text editing suite. Not sure I understand > maybe you're satisfied with a simple text editor but i think i'll pass on that one, considering what i use emacs for. What do you use emacs for? I use nvim for writing various prototypes and interpreters in python, utilities, basic osdev, and X stuff in C, NixOS configuration, scripts in bash, basic osdev assembly in nasm, website front-end with ts The only code which I don't write in nvim is Java, for which I use intellij. Game engines, minecraft mods, and website backends. I do the front-end in nvim, and any kinda jni stuff in C in nvim as well. I did a bit of mod writing in plain nvim as well, but it wasn't very good. Did it in emacs as well, but yea... (n)vim is by no means a simple text editor. It's a full-blown code editor. It's not an operating system like emacs, but is much better at writing code than emacs, imo. Evil is very buggy and only emulates basic keys and a few commands. It's more Vi than Vim, after all it has vi in the name, not vim. To name a few features of vim: Filename completion Word completion Goto definition either in a file or with ctags Very expressive editing, so you can make complex changes very quickly. It's extremely powerful. Showing compile errors Lsp support Fuzzy finder With a few basic plugins: Syntax highlight powered by parsing the file Automatic folds from brackets, tabs, or file structure by parsing Highlighting of css colors A file tree

Thant's right. My bad

Thank you. You wrote it, but I missed. Sorry

>To name a few features of vim: > >Filename completion > hippie-expand (built-in), capf backend provided by cape. >Word completion > dabbrev-expand (M-/), hippie-expand. >Goto definition either in a file or with ctags > xref-find-definitions (M-.) >Very expressive editing, so you can make complex changes very quickly. It's extremely powerful. > Subjective, so I will refrain from answering. >Showing compile errors > M-x compile? Also sounds like a job for lsp. >Lsp support > lsp-mode, eglot. >Fuzzy finder > fido (basically the flex completion style). >With a few basic plugins: > >Syntax highlight powered by parsing the file > Emacs will soon again tree-sitter support in core. >Automatic folds from brackets, tabs, or file structure by parsing > hs-minor-mode. >Highlighting of css colors > css-mode already does this. >A file tree dired? If that does not work, then there are packages like treemacs.

Ah yes finally winner mode is appreciated

What is the difference?

Is winner mode also good for linux?

:D awesome, i hope i get to that, too.

nice, i think, keep an open mind for IDE's Just check out Visual studio along side with emacs.

I envy you, that you had found the tool back then.

What a funny paradox.

Winner Mode is not about Windows. It tracks the history of frame layouts, so it is useful on any operating system.

Sure emacs can do it, I was just saying that vim ain't just a simple text editor Also the lsp support is built-in without any plugins

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There is no regularly-updated window display of the document. Any display is the result of a command. For example, ed(1) is a line editor. Analogy: gdb on the command line vs a debugger in an IDE.

I don't think that finding Emacs too buggy is a common experience at all. Could you share some of the bugs you found? IAlso, are you sure they were bugs in Emacs and not in some third party packages?

Emacs is not that useful to me without packages, so bugs in packages are critical to me. Same how a barebones Linux install wouldn't be that useful. I need at the very least evil mode just to even be able to use the editor as an editor. As for bugs, I think they are mostly package bugs. Many in evil mode, lsp mode, org-roam, treemacs... Basically most packages I tried have bugs which are obvious immediately on use and range from unusable, very annoying to incontinent.

That's what I expected, that the bugs you found where mostly in third party packages. Good to confirm.

I've flirted with emacs a few times, but the relationship didn't take off until I had repetitive stress injury from clicking the left mouse button. I finally got all the way through the tutorial, but we were still "just friends." We entered into a committed relationship after seeing how org-mode could be used to export to LaTeX. I've tried several organization tools over the years, tiddlywiki, Thinking Rock, Everdo. I was burned by poor cross platform compatibility, application changes freezing my data. I'm a happy Org-mode user now. It's pretty much the only emacs mode I use.

Well, that doesn't make it any less bad, imo.

It is fair to have that opinion! Certainly if you absolutely want to use some Emacs package and said package is buggy, then Emacs may not be useful for you. What I don't think is fair is to call a bug in a third party package "a bug in Emacs". If you use a buggy Linux application do you say Linux is buggy? If you use a buggy web app do you say the browser is buggy? If you use a buggy Java programa do you say the JVM is buggy? If the answer to those questions is no, you should probably extend the same courtesy (common sense?) to Emacs.

I have not called emacs buggy, I just said that when I tried to use emacs as a code editor, ofc installing the necessary packages, I encountered too many bugs to use it as such. Mostly in what I consider essential packages, like evil.

You said: > I tried to use emacs several times for writing code, but it was too buggy so I gave up. I hope you'll agree it was reasonable to assume "it" referred to Emacs, which is why I thought you were claiming Emacs was buggy. It turns out that "it" referred to a completely unmentioned set of third party packages!

I wasn't using Unix. On the first Unix system I used, in 1982, we all used MINCE (MINCE Is Not Complete Emacs). We tried GNU but it swamped our little PDP-11.

Have you ever used vi? It doesn't even have complex text objects (just basic motions), multilevel undo, macros, etc. Evil doesn't provide perfect emulation, but it goes as far as to provide a bunch of esoteric features from vim most vim users don't even know exist. To say evil only emulates a few basic keys and commands is absurd. What major bugs did you encounter with evil?

I have used vi a few times, and it's not enough for me. I am used to vim. So a vi emulator is not enough to me. It does have a few vim features, but judging it as a vim emulator: :tabnew is implemented wrong (conforms to vi, not vim) Number inc/dec clashes with emacs shortcuts Redo is broken by default Evil disables itself in some modes And I tried it a year or so ago, when I used even less vim keys. There's probably more. It's not really absurd, evil itself says it emulates *vi*. I need *vim*.

Sure it's reasonable to interpret it that way, but I explained to you that's not what I meant. "it" referred to writing code in emacs, not emacs itself.

You should not expect non-editing features like tabs to work exactly like in vim because Emacs is not vim. Especially when you then complain that inc/Dec keybindings conflict with default Emacs keybindings. When it comes to windows, tabs, buffers, and other areas where vim and Emacs are fundamentally different (e.g. the quickfix window and regex syntax), evil doesn't always try to uselessly make things exactly the same. When it comes to actual editing functionality, there is no vim emulator plugin in any editor more complete than evil. You can choose what package you want to use for redo. This is not a bug. It is a couple of lines to use evil everywhere. This is not a bug. You have not mentioned any major (or minor) editing features that evil is missing or any bugs. It's beyond absurd to the point that I'm not sure if you are completely serious or calling it a vi emulator as an insult. Evil is a vim emulator not a vi emulator. Evil calls itself the extensible vi layer, but if you read the first page of the manual you'll understand why. It's not called that because it limits itself to emulating vi. If it did it wouldn't provide dozens of features not in vi. It is specifically focused on vim, not vi, functionality. Emacs already has an actual vi emulator builtin (viper, which still goes beyond vi but is much closer to it). I've gone through all the editing parts of Practical Vim in evil. It's not 100% compatible, but the level of support for registers, ranges, macros, ex commands, etc. was far beyond what I had expected. To say it has a few vim features is a massive understatement. It has a ton of vim features you probably don't even know exist or at least don't use regularly. If evil is not a vim emulator by your standards, then there is no such thing as a vim emulator.

The *command* is implement wrong. I can understand tabs itself not being implemented properly, but in that case why bother at all. This is an issue, because it is a common editing keybind which I do use. It's not a window/buffer thing. I don't care, I want something which is good, not smth which is better than similar software. All the vim emulators I tried were bad. I guess it's an intended bug then. It's a stupid idea. Oh really? What are those magic lines? I have. I stopped testing after I found out that tabnew is wrongly implemented, inc/dec is not implemented, and evil constantly turns itself off at random times or just doesn't turn on at all in most non-editing modes. Evil does not emulate vim. The tabnew implementation is correct in vi, not in vim. Most people argue when this happens that evil is a vi emulator. It even says itself and is in the name. It emulates some vim features from what I seen, but mostly focuses on *vi*. Not sure what Practical Vim is. Sounds like the name of a book. I don't care, it lacks the features I need and has random bugs as I described. I don't remember all of them, it's a year. You could absolutely call it a vim emulator even tho it does not emulate vim, since neither do any of the other vim emulators yet they still call themselves vim emulators.

> I have. I stopped testing after I found out that tabnew is wrongly implemented, inc/dec is not implemented, and evil constantly turns itself off at random times or just doesn't turn on at all in most non-editing modes. None of these are bugs or missing features; they are configuration issues on your part. You seem to want something that works exactly how you want out of the box without the need to do any configuration or install any other packages, which is unrealistic. Why would you even try another editor if you want something that is exactly the same as vim (or neovim) rather than something that can be functionally equivalent? If your point is that you found evil unnecessarily difficult or time-consuming to configure correctly, that's fine (though for me, the opposite is the case when comparing Emacs to neovim), but it's just not true that these are bugs or impossible to do with evil. > Oh really? What are those magic lines? The basic configuration would just be this before loading evil: (setq evil-emacs-state-modes nil evil-insert-state-modes nil evil-motion-state-modes nil evil-overriding-maps nil evil-intercept-maps nil) > It even says itself and is in the name. It emulates some vim features from what I seen, but mostly focuses on vi. Again, this is just objectively wrong. The evil documentation disagrees with you. The fact that a massive percentage of the codebase is dedicated towards features that don't exist in vi disagrees with you. You barely tried evil, so I'm not sure why you're insisting this is the case, and I'm not sure why you're commenting on the Emacs subreddit when you seem to have such little interest in it. No, evil doesn't support vimscript (thankfully), or vim's settings, or vim's help system (which is far more basic/limited than Emacs'), or vim's keybinding system (which is far more basic/limited Emacs'), etc. If to be a vim or vi emulator, something must be a near drop-in replacement, then evil is not even a vi emulator. However, from an editing perspective, there is not any major functionality from vim that is missing.

So it's broken by default? Got it. I don't want something the same, I want vim's editing for editing text. Emacs doesn't give me that, so I am not using it for writing code. Ighty, I'll try that. Kay I swear it said vi. Still, for example tabnew has the vi, not vim impl. Why am I commenting? Because you asked me. I just said it's buggy and left it at that in my original comment. Not everyone uses emacs as their operating system. I use it for documents. Which is why I am here. I don't care about vimscript, imo it should support basic sets, but whatevs. I think the vim emulated stuff should get help pages and :h should be linked to it. There is many things missing, as I have described. Sure you can add it yourself, but at this point why use evil at all?