[0xFFFE]

I started off with Emacs and a month a later tried Vi. I found Vi to be a better fit for me than Emacs and haven't looked back since. I have huge respect for both editors, they both are much older than me :) I wish I could write something that people would find useful for years to come. Having said that, I love to jab(friendly) at Emacs users in my circle of friends and colleagues. Makes the conversation even more colourful with a bit of booze inside ;)

[agumonkey]

Am a 99% emacs user, but I almost prefer vi text editing paradigm. Very precise and regular set of basic operations. Logical and rapid.

It's an interesting two sides of the same coin. Emacs, as lisp legacy, is centric, everything as layers around a lisp core (and C bits). Vi is more island like, complex logic is delegated to external programs most of the time.

It's interesting to compare the two, how to decouple/modularize a system.

[pmoriarty]

Are you using vi or vim? Have you tried emacs with evil?

[0xFFFE]

Now, Vim. But I would definitely like to give Emacs another try, just for kicks. Do you think emacs with evil is the path with least resistance for a long term Vi/Vim user?

[mtalantikite]

I’ve been a daily vim user for the past 10 or so years and used it casually before that. Anytime I tried to use emacs I missed the modal aspects of vim and my wrists didn’t like the focus around ctrl in emacs.

I recently gave spacemacs a try and it’s been my daily editor for the past few months. There is a lot to learn, but spacemacs solves the main pain points I had with off the shelf emacs and I’ve found it to be very productive for me.

[joshstella]

Author of post here. I have no agenda to convert anyone, but mapping caps lock to control is a good move when trying emacs IMO. If you love vi(m), more power to you!

[mtalantikite]

Oh, yeah I use that mapping (caps to ctrl), but emacs would still always hurt my wrists! I prefer having visual/insert/normal modes and spacebar for modifiers in spacemacs. It’s the best of both worlds for me.

[eadmund]

I think Spacemacs (which is an integrated emacs + evil + a whole lot more) is probably the best upgrade path for a vi/vim user. I even got one of the fellows at the office to upgrade from vim using it!

[0xFFFE]

Thanks, but "upgrade"? ;)

[emidln]

I went from a fully decked out vimrc to Spacemacs when I got tired of managing a .vim directory. I had things like Unite integrated everywhere and a generic repl experience via tmux so I had an inferior-mode for anything I wanted (sql, python, clojure, javascript, bash, ruby), even on remote machines (since it was just copy something from a register to a tmux pane, which could be ssh logged into a remote machine with a repl). I had autocompletion and doc lookups for the languages I cared about. Life was pretty good, but it was beginning to get tedious.

I decided to try Spacemacs hoping I might find their vim imitation to be 90% of what I was using in vim, such that I could take advantage of the excellent CIDER mode for Clojure development rather than hacking an analogue in vimscript + a user.clj file. I found Spacemacs to cover everything I had been doing in vim, almost universally better out of the box than I had before.

[cat199]

not OP, but yes.

most people that cite vi-vs-emacs diatribes these days have never actually even used "real" vi -

vim has just about all the "bloat" of emacs but without the real extensibility/programmability..

and just about any emacs session will likely be an order of magnitude smaller than any ide, while on the topic of bloat.

- someone who uses emacs and vi (but not vim)

ps: BSD is Unix