Comment by wwarner
18 hours ago
My usage of emacs is so vim-like that I’ve tried switching a few times. Vim is definitely faster, and overlays and cursor placement is much simpler and more intuitive. But there were still feature gaps and configuration issues that prevented full adoption.
You may get good bang for your buck out of neovim. With only a very minimal set of plugins, it has replaced all other IDEs for me. (They're also making good progress Sherlocking their core plugins, so the future is bright for those of us who dislike plugins for core functionality.)
can you elaborate? Heavy vim user here, have considered using emacs in vim mode to quell a decades long nagging curiosity. Just need a compelling nudge.
If you haven't used it before, give it a shot. Worst case you waste a few years of your life.
Doom emacs and Spacemacs are both good starter kits to give you an idea of what you could do.
I don't know how much this applies to everyone else, but the ability to display images inline is really nice for notetaking. I cannot write properly, so org-mode (a notetaking tool that can export to a variety of formats) with embedded rendered latex equations makes it really easy to take notes and write things up in a plaintext format without needing to export every 30 seconds to view equations. The ability to embed code that can actually run is also very nice.
Check out Doom Emacs if you are looking for a good starting point. The defaults make sense coming from Vim.
Emacs is primarily a platform for developing Lisp applications. Lisp applications are immensely hackable, meaning an Emacs configuration can be tailored in detail to specific desires.
There is also an ecosystem of applications for Emacs that are really good. They don't require you to use Emacs as your editor (you can run, say, Magit as a standalone instance) but if you do, they integrate really well with each other.
+1