| This is going further & further OT, but hey - I didn't start it! What you need is a motivating factor. Vim is almost guaranteed to be there on any Linux/BSD/Mac shell environment, which motivates people in those environments to learn it even if they learn no other editor. Beyond such environments, like on any desktop GUI, what'd motivate you to try GUI Vim? For Emacs, I can say the integration between any set of tools you can imagine could be a motivation. The reason Emacs users don't particularly appreciate IDE's is that Emacs' integration of code editor, compiler output, debugger control makes the development cycle extremely fast. Add any 1 more use to that. File explorer? Emacs dired. Process monitor? Emacs proced. Interactive shells? Emacs integrates Unix shell, Python sessions, anything interactive actually. You will get all your work done in Emacs, just using editor operations! Go to the source code for a compiler error? Hit "Enter" or click on the error in the compile window. Go to the source code being debugged? Stepping in the debugger automatically opens the file at the right line number. Found the bug? The code is already there ready to be fixed; switch to the compile window & compile. Find a file in a directory? Do a text search in its dired window. Rename all files beginning with foo to begin with bar instead? Do a search-replace. Emacs also scales way better than any desktop editor or Vim, whether it is opening GB-sized log files, or binary files viewed/edited in hexadecimal. Before long, you start managing your to-do's using org-mode, and doing all your Git operations in the insanely featureful Magit interface. The list gets longer and longer every release. And many Linux shell environments support the same basic keyboard short-cuts (Ctrl-A to go to beginning of line, Ctrl-E to go to the end, Ctrl-R to search in the shell history), and also provide light-weight Emacs clones like 'zile', 'mg' for editing-only use in the terminal. |