[iLemming]

> what's wrong with the Neovim ecosystem

Nothing's wrong with it. It's just incomparable categorically. Just like you can't really equate a photo-editor and the web-browser. Sure, there's a way to do photo editing in the browser, still will be weird to compare them.

> Neovim has been much better

In what sense? Emacs is a Lisp interpreter with a text editor embedded in it - one can fully emulate Neovim features in it, the opposite is hardly possible - you can bolt Lisp interpreter on top of Neovim, but it won't be the same.

> I just want a good text editor

Is that implying Emacs doesn't have "a good one"? You probably just have not discovered some mind-blowing features of the editor. It is hands down the best-known machine ever designed to deal with plain text, nothing even comes close. Indirect buffers alone are such a brilliant idea, I have zero clue how people ever exposed to that power would willingly abandon it. I get it though, building a text-manipulating theater orchestrated by Lisp is not for everyone. Unfortunately, most newcomers get attracted to Emacs hearing "how powerful an editor it is", without ever learning what exactly makes it as such.

[royal__]

That all makes sense. I wasn't trying to attack Emacs or defend Neovim, for the record. I liked Emacs and didn't have any problems with it (except some window jankiness). I was mostly just curious about the ecosystem.

The big reason I switched is because a lot of the big features of Emacs (org mode, magit, "living" in Emacs, advanced text manipulation, the extreme extensibility of the software) were things that sound really amazing on paper, but in practice I just don't really need/use/care about, and that's just my preferences. But once again, Emacs is cool and I totally respect what it can do.

[iLemming]

Missing the point - it's not about "attacking/defending" - Emacs and Vim just can't be compared categorically, the core of their design is about two dissimilar, unrelated concepts. Vim's augmentation of modality is absolutely brilliant, beautiful model, enormously practical idea. Emacs rooted in another incredible, powerful idea - practical symbolic notation for lambda calculus. Comparing them plainly from their "text editor" aspect is wrong - it creates wrong perception of they are about.

It's almost invariably about the trade-offs, without knowing what they are and how to navigate them would remain a highly debatable topic.

You have fixated on a single (albeit voluminous) aspect of things to make a choice. But there are dozens of other things we can drop there and steer away from Emacs with wrong conclusions, e.g. Emacs has mail client capabilities, and for anyone unfamiliar with Lisp, it might be obvious - more specialized email apps would look far more capable. But for an experienced Lisper, no specialized app would ever suffice. Particularly because Lisp allows them to adapt things with extreme precision, specifically for their use cases.

> The big reason I switched

You have switched (as it seems) without even understanding what it was about. It's not about Org, Magit, or any other "features" of Emacs. The main idea is and always was the Lisp interpreter. For someone like me (staunch Lisper) Magit is not some "packaged", ready-to-use piece of software, it's a set of libraries I can use. I can easily incorporate just about any Magit function into my workflow directly. I don't have to submit patches, I don't have to ask anyone's permission, I don't have to guess - the source code is given, I don't even have to save my experiments anywhere - I can just start typing Elisp code in my scratch buffer and eval things in place. Similarly - I use Org-mode for a bunch of things that may sound absolutely unrelated - I consume HN, Reddit, Jira, GitHub, Slack and other content in org-mode derived buffers. Why? Again, because of bunch of APIs, functions and commands that Org provides. I can for example easily retrieve any HN thread and extract all the URLs people posted in comments, and inspect each in-place - takes me a keystroke. Or I can send the text to an LLM - without ever copying and pasting, without context switching, without losing focus. No other [popular] piece of software ever granted me such enormous power and liberation.

I am absolutely so grateful to my younger self for forcing me to grok Emacs and Lisp, and I will never understand the sentiment and the "reasoning" of people moving away from it (after being exposed to its absolute supremacy over plain text). Realistically, there's never switching away from Emacs for me, that, unless a better Lisp engine emerges at some point. And btw. I am a die-hard Vimmer. I use vim motions everywhere - system wide. They permeate my editors/IDEs, web browsers, terminals, and yes, even Emacs. And I use Neovim as well - it works well when I need to reach for it - like I said: it's not a comparison.

[JadeNB]

> In what sense? Emacs is a Lisp interpreter with a text editor embedded in it - one can fully emulate Neovim features in it, the opposite is hardly possible - you can bolt Lisp interpreter on top of Neovim, but it won't be the same.

Unless this is specifically what you want to do with Neovim, in which case you'll probably just use Emacs anyway, Neovim's inability to do this is probably not a strike against it. As royal__ says (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48537120), they are just interested in a good text editor, not in raw computational power.