[Lio]

The thing is, having tried Evil/Spacemacs, they're still really Emacs not Vim.

At some point you have drop out of the pseudo Vim world do things the Emacs way, keybindings and all.

For me personally, that's not what I want.

e.g. I like to use C-h as an alternative to backspace, it helps relieves my RSA not have to reach for backspace. Spacemacs provides that binding in some places but not all.

To get get C-h to consistently act as backspace I ended up effectively breaking the help system (which for an Emacs newbie like me is a bad thing).

I found loads of other things like that where I just want it to work the Vim way.

What I _really_ want is a better Vim not another editor pretending to be Vim on a superficial level. I'm glad to have the options that both Vim 8 and NeoVim offer.

Of course Emacs is an amazing bit of software and Spacemacs is a great configuration so if they work for you, more power to you.

[kozikow]

> At some point you have drop out of the pseudo Vim world do things the Emacs way, keybindings and all.

or many packages there are many "vim-optimized" packages nowadays, e.g. evil-ediff, evil-org or evil-magit.

> e.g. I like to use C-h as an alternative to backspace, it helps relieves my RSA not have to reach for backspace.

I would do such remapping on the system level. E.g. I personally have my layout implemented in C++ on system level: https://github.com/kozikow/keyremaplinux

> I found loads of other things like that where I just want it to work the Vim way.

In Emacs in general it's easier to customise to do things your way. After a bit investment into learning elisp you can make it work however you want, including vim way. vim is not as customisable.

[Lio]

Yeah I'm pretty sure Emacs can be made to do anything.

I love that idea and I keep telling myself I'll go back and give give it another try sometime. Would love to get really into org-mode, etc.

It's just that Vim is so comfortable! ...like a nice old pair of Goodyear welted shoes.

[qwertyuiop924]

As much as I've been complaining about Vim in this thread, I don't think it's evil, or anything. But I do love Emaca as much as you love Vi, for much the same reasons (although some of those one character commands make me envious). You could always use both (the non-religious option).

Come to the dark side. We have macros.

[Lio]

OK I'll make you a deal, as soon as I've mastered every feature in Vim I'll move on to Emacs. :)

Which reminds me, I must reread that stackoverflow post about grokking vi again.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-most...

[qwertyuiop924]

That's an incredibly useful post.

Anyways, I only suggested it because you seemed interested. There's certainly no requirement to do so. And since you'll never master every feature in Vim, you'll never use Emacs if you have that requirement.

The sad thing about Vi is its Lisp mode: the original Vi had a pretty nice mode for editing Lisp, which most clones have not recreated.

[flukus]

> or many packages there are many "vim-optimized" packages nowadays, e.g. evil-ediff, evil-org or evil-magit.

Sure, they come with bindings, but what about my custom bindings? Working with HJKL does not mean they are vim optimized.

[qwertyuiop924]

That's certainly a way of thinking about things.

I guess what I really want is for Vim to decide what it wants to be. You can be simple, or you can be extensible. Vim is kind of trying to be both. Traditionally, Emacs did extensible, and Vi did simple. It's fine if Vim wants to go the emacs route, it's just that I'd rather it stopped doing it so badly: At this point, Vim's extensibility story is embarrassing. It's 2016, the built-in language is rubbish, the external language interfaces are second-class at best. This has to change if Vim really wants to go in that direction. And if doesn't, why bother pretending?

[Lio]

I don't want to discard your opinion but it does seem like a bit of a false dichotomy when we're talking about FOSS software.

No one is compelled to use Vim over Vi, you can just leave it in compatible mode or use another vi binary such as the one in busybox.

As far as the built in language and external API being second-class well you may have a point but both Vim and NeoVim are improving.

Whilst it's still useful and still provides, IMHO, nice ergonomics I'm probably going to stick with either Vim or NeoVim I think. I really don't mind if they never make up their mind what they want to be when they grow up. ;)

[qwertyuiop924]

That's a respectable opinion.

From my perspective, I want to see Vim/NeoVim differentiating itself from the competition. It's extensible... but emacs does that better. It's simple and modal... but nvi does that better. It's stuck somewhere in the middle, and mediocrity is a terrible, terrible fate.

Ow! Stop that! Okay, this is the last time I sneak a Dresden Files quote into my HN comments. I swear. :-D.