throwawayish

I think that one of emacs’ surprising great points is that there is a plugin for a lot of smaller languages. If you’re working with a language that has no special text editor love at all you’re likely better off using vim but if the language authors made a plugin for their language, it’s likely either going to be for emacs or vscode.

Very interesting. I didn't know that Emacs was better at providing plugins. Would you happen to know to what that is attributable?

Spacemacs has a bespoke customization system involving layers that is not all that friendly towards copy & pasting code from the internet. Doom emacs customization leans more to the vanilla side which can help if you need to solve a problem in your workflow.

Did I understand you correct in that customizing Spacemacs is a completely different beast. So knowledge acquired related to it doesn't translate well to Vanilla/Doom Emacs and vice versa?

I tend to use both, depending on the situation, with a lighter nvim config. Sometimes the 3 second emacs startup time is annoying so I use vim then. I think its fine to try both.

Could you elaborate more upon your workflow? Like, in which situation do you prefer Emacs and when do you prefer Neovim? I get that the lighter option is preferred when you want to perform a quick edit or can't be bothered with startup time. But I want to know it beyond that and -if possible- what led you to favor one over the other in each situation.

Regarding emacs declining popularity, I think that in the long term it could be a problem, since most people don’t want to learn elisp just to configure their editor. Elisp is very powerful in emacs, but its design is very different to other languages, so as emacs contributors get older, it could possibly lead to less and less new contributors.

How do you envision Emacs' future? Would, at some moment in the future, some kind of compatibility layer of sorts be developed that lower the entrance barrier? To my knowledge, Emacs has -contrary to Vim- been more open to community development. So I don't expect something like NeoVim to be developed for Emacs as there's less need for it. But I don't know how much they'd be willing to change Emacs for the sake of making it more attractive for new users.

Idk about the vim distros, but I think Doom Emacs is easier for beginners to get into.

Compared to Spacemacs I assume*. If so, would you mind elaborating?

Since childhood, they wanted to become the head of a bank; this wish -however- was more rooted in the (childish/immature) association that being at that position should mean that they've made it (monetary-wise). So, they started Finance with the belief that it would be the best step to attain that goal. Furthermore, I believe they had misinformed ideas on what studying Finance was at the time 😅,

I appreciate your input. Thank you!

Also, there are too many plugins to serve the same purpose and I found it difficult (compared to neovim) to figure out the difference between them.

Interesting.

Finally, the level of customization was also less granular than what offers neovim.

Very interesting. I'd love to hear more about this. Could you elaborate?

I would add that neovim and emacs both have a steep learning curve but I personaly found the level of support and core and plugins documentation for neovim more accessible, readable, and better organized.

I wouldn't be surprised if this is in part attributable to the fact that Emacs is both an older project and is generally-speaking a bigger and/or more capable piece of software.

I completely share your vision about what an IDE should be doing. I’m old school and adhere to the “do one thing but do it right” philosophy. Also, I hate relying on one tool for several needs because if anything goes wrong it has multiple impacts.

I've often heard Emacs users pose the argument that Emacs as an Elisp interpreter does just one thing. It's just that this single thing allows the myriad of functionality it offers. So in that sense comparing it to a terminal/console seems more apt than comparing it to a text editor. I wonder what you think of that argument.

As a side note, I use neomutt as my email client and you can nicely couple neovim to it to write your emails ;)

Hehe, that's cool! Currently I'm really happy with Thunderbird so I don't expect to move away anytime soon, but I'll keep it in mind.

I think running neovim as a standalone app is rooted in the desire to manage it with a window manager

Interesting. Makes sense.

but for me, being in the terminal is a huge plus. Pair that with tmux, and you can piece together an IDE outside of nvim as well, say, running gdb in a window compiling your app in another, and having nvim open in the next with convenient hotkeys to manage the windows and copy text fluidly between them.

I haven't worked much with either NeoVim or Tmux, but I assume there's a way to restore your most recent 'terminal-state'. Which, in turn, enables one to start working as soon as they've opened either one of NeoVim or Tmux. Am I right?

I use Emacs + spacemacs in VI mode as a base for all my text editing

Do you specifically prefer using Spacemacs as a base over Doom Emacs? Or is the usage of Spacemacs primarily attributable to it coming earlier to the scene?

Furthermore, as you're using it in "VI mode", would it be fair to assume that you've got some experience/history with Neo(Vim) as well? If so, what led you to making the switch from (Neo)Vim to Emacs?

For dev environments I mostly use nix + direnv + direnv-mode.

Very interesting! Relying on Nix rather than Distrobox has been something I've been pondering upon. But besides the fact that I'm still very new to Nix as an ecosystem, I've also got my concerns related to what degree the containers can be sandboxed. Do you happen to have some insights on this?

Hi!

I’ve briefly shared my experience with neo(vim) and emacs here.

Thanks for sharing that! I've just read through it and it was a very interesting read. Would you mind elaborating upon the following statement?

"the lack of uniformity across plugins coding which sometimes created some conflicts"

I think the main factor of choice would be to know if you prefer to build your own perfect tool with just what you need and expand as you go (i.e. neovim) or just have a do-it-all ready tool right out of the box (i.e. emacs).

That is indeed something that concerns me regarding Emacs. Like being able to surf on the internet or using it as a email client isn't quite what I expect out of my IDE 😅. I guess the extensibility should allow 'minimal' installations, but this is something I should read more into. Thanks for pointing that out!

How long did you try using Vi (or any other "mode-switch vietnam-era editors with cult like followings")? Have you experimented with any starter kit/distribution/config (or whatever) to ease you in? What do you use now?

Btw, I agree that stand-alone Vi probably is too far of a departure from modern IDEs. As far as I know, it's not even possible to give it IDE-like functionality apart from a few basic ones. Both Vim and especially Neovim do a better job at bridging the distance. FWIW, Vim only exists like for three decades now, while Neovim's first release happened in 2014; almost 10 years ago.

Btw, you make excellent points! Thank you for that. Much appreciated!

I’ve found that it is FOSS vs proprietary that causes beloved tech to die

There's definitely truth in that.

VSCode is, by a wide margin, now the most popular IDE. If MS abandons it, there’s a fleet of us ready to continue using VSCodium.

I can definitely see that happen.

Edit: The usual issue with plugins on VSCodium, out of the box, is that it defaults to a completely different plugin set, due to MS license rules about their plugin repository. It’s trivial to switch it back with a config file edit, which is, admittedly, a little buried, in the project FAQ. The VSCodium plugin repository is growing better over time, but there’s not good awareness of it yet by most plugin developers.

Wow! Thank you so much! At the time I just needed something that works, so the path of least resistance (read: go back to VS Code) was preferred. So, I probably didn't even bother finding a way to resolve the issue at the time. But this paragraph has provided a great amount of pointers that will surely help solving it.

Perhaps I should include VSCodium as another viable alternative 😜. So that it becomes -at the very least- the path of least resistance to Emacs and/or (Neo)Vim.

Thank you for touching upon some of LunarVim's 'oddities'!

Ah okay. It has become a lot more clear what you meant. And I agree; implementation for Vi(m) keybindings is ubiquitous while the same can't be said for Emacs'. But, while Vi(m)'s keybindings define a lot of what it is and why people love to use it, the same simply can't be said for Emacs' keybindings. I'm sure there's someone out there that absolutely loves it, but it doesn't come close to how Emacs' modeless nature allows almost limitless extensibility or how 'smart', 'useful' and just plain excellent its org-mode is.

If you like VSCode, and want the longevity of FOSS, you can switch to https://vscodium.com/

For some reason I had a very bad experience with running plugins on VSCodium. IIRC, there was something about plugin support being a lot worse for some reason. But it might also have been related to something else.

The Vim keybindings for VSCode/VSCodium are ridiculously good

It indeed seems to be a lot better than what I was expecting.

As a diehard Vim user, VSCodium with VSCodeVim is a terrific no-nonsense combination.

But, once again, I'm afraid that eventually VS Code (and thus by extension VSCodium) will be forsaken for some reason. Thus making me, once again, deal with the pain of switching to another IDE, become accustomed to it. Not being as extensible as Emacs/Neo(Vim) anyway etc etc. Like, I believe we're always one 'evolution'/'development' removed from losing our favorite IDE. For example, Jetbrains has been developing their upcoming Fleet IDE. IIUC, it's their version of VS Code; which honestly is cool. But, does beg the question if it will one day replace the fleet of dedicated programming language IDEs that Jetbrains currently supports...

EDIT: lol I only noticed you had edited it after I had commented it.

Edit: Regarding Vim plugin packs, I honestly only ever had a bad time with curated plugin collections. I don’t think the default settings in Vim are that bad anymore, and are trivial to change as you go when something annoys you.

Would that only include Vim plugin packs like SpaceVim etc? Or actually the premade NeoVim 'configs'/'distributions'?

Regarding the ‘split’ in Vim options, Vim is growing up into a protocol, rather than just an editor. As a ‘trapped in Vim’ user, back in the day, I’m delighted that essentially every serious editor now supports Vim keybindings*.''

True. Great insight. But, it sometimes seems to me as if most implementation are rather lazy ones; in the sense that they only feature a very small feature set that Vi(m) provides. I might be wrong though*.