Comment by sanderjd

Yeah I’m in my 40s and have been using vim for decades. Sure there was an occasional rando stirring up the forums about made-up productivity gains to get some traffic to their blog, but that was it. There has always been push back from many of the strongest vim advocates that the appeal is not about typing speed or whatever it was they were claiming. It’s just ergonomics and power.

It’s just not comparable to the LLM crazy hype train.

And to belabor your other point, I have treesitter, lsp, and GitHub Copilot agent all working flawlessly in neovim. Ts and lsp are neovim builtins now. And it’s custom built for exactly how I want it to be, and none of that blinking shit or nagging dialog boxes all over VSCode.

I have VScode and vim open to the same files all day quite literally side by side, because I work at Microsoft, share my screen often, and there are still people that have violent allergic reactions to a terminal and vim. Vim can do everything VSCode does and it’s not dogshit slow.

I use most of the best vim features in VS Code with their vim bindings.

You'd be hard-pressed to find a popular editor without vim bindings.

> vim and Emacs are not equipped to handle.

You clearly don't have a slightest idea of what you're talking about.

Emacs is actually still amazing in the LLM era. Language is all about plain text. Plain text remains crucial and will remain important because it's human-readable, machine-parsable, version-control friendly, lightweight and fast, platform-independent, and resistant to obsolescence. Even when analyzing huge amounts of complex data - images, videos, audio-recordings, etc., we often have to reduce it to text representation.

And there's simply no tool better than Emacs today that is well-suited for dealing with plain text. Nothing even comes close to what you can do with text in Emacs.

Like, check this out - I am right now transcribing my audio notes into .srt (subtitle) files. There's subed-mode where you can read through subtitles, and even play the audio, karaoke style, while following the text. I can do so many different things from here - extract the summaries, search through things, gather analytics - e.g., how often have I said 'fuck' on Wednesdays, etc.

I can similarly play YouTube videos in mpv, while controlling the playback, volume, speed, etc. from Emacs; I can extract subtitles for a given video and search through them, play the vid from the exact place in the subs.

I very often grab a selected region of screen during Zoom sessions to OCR and extract text within it and put it in my notes - yes, I do it in Emacs.

I can probably examine images, analyze their elements, create comprehensive summaries, and formulate expert artistic evaluation and critique and even ask Emacs to read it aloud back to me - the possibilities are virtually limitless.

It allows you to engage with vast array of LLM models from anywhere. I can ask a question in the midst of typing a Slack reply or reading HN comments or when composing a git commit; I can fact-check my own assumptions. I can also use tools to analyze and refactor existing codebases and vibe-code new stuff.

Anything like that even five years ago seemed like a dream; today it is possible. We can now reduce any complex digital data to plain text. And that feels miraculous.

If anything, the LLM era has made Emacs an extremely compelling choice. To be honest, for me - it's not even a choice, it's the only seriously viable option I have - despite all its drawbacks. Everything else doesn't even come close - other options either lacking critical features or have merely promising ones. Emacs is absolutely, hands-down, one of the best tools we humans have ever produced to deal with plain text. Anyone who thinks it's an opinion and not a fact simply hasn't grokked Emacs or has no clue what you can do with it.