| I used Vim for a quite a few years before switching to Emacs and I was fairly proficient at it. Although similar to Unix and Emacs it would take a lifetime or more to know everything about it. I still use Vi(m) today when logged in to a remote server or for small editing tasks, but the more advanced usage has slipped from my memory... I don't even know how to use keyboard macros anymore. There's one big 'if' to my Vim usage which made me want to try out new editors: I never really like the modal editing paradigm. Upon getting interested in Common Lisp I switched to Emacs because I also wanted to be able to use ILISP (Slime nowadays). Once I made some customizations and implemented some ideas which I thought would be cool for an editor to have I never looked back[1]. Modern day IDEs haven't really been able to impress me either and Emacs' customization language being a Lisp was a pro as well. However, I have customized a lot of my keybindings. While the basic editing commands are okayish the more complex "chords" are hideous and all the additional modes add more and more complex chords. By custom there's one prefix ("C-c" IIRC) behind which the user can put his own keybindings but I just ignore that and override everything to fit my keybindings. (Even more fun: I recently decided to change my keybindings to fit in more with the more custom keybindings found in other applications found on Unix, Windows and Mac: Ctrl-o for opening a file, Ctrl-f for search, Ctrl-r for replace, Ctrl-w for closing a window/tab/buffer, etc. etc. It's not been too bad actually and seems like a keeper.) I've never found it hard to switch between them (apart from the occasional 'ZZ' in Emacs) just like it's never been hard to switch between QWERTY and Dvorak for me. [1] Being able to customize and try out new things without have to recompile or even restart is very nice. (ie. the Lisp way) |