What Are The Benefits Of Emacs Over Vim?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 2 ต.ค. 2024
- Probably one of the most common Vim/Emacs questions that I get is "Why would I choose Emacs over Vim?" Or "what does Emacs have to offer that Vim doesn't?" You see this question all the time from Vim users on message boards and support forums. So I wanted to take a minute to answer it.
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hackers stole 10gb of proprietary elisp code. Luckily it was the end of the file and only the closing parentheses were stolen
Ahaha
Classic
What! They can know how many functions/data/lists are in the file! NOOOOOOOOOOO!
time for an amazon ebook of emacs jokes
@@TheSulross I would buy that. But not a vim book about that. Yes, I use Emacs for most things.
@@TheSulross That's actually more of a lisp joke. They all boil down to "haha, look at the parentheses."
Finally an excellent explanation of what emacs is that allows me to make the aducated decision of staying with vim.
*educated
@@RoboticRabbit3312 Lol, typo.
Status: Won't fix
Reason: Breaks comments context
@@danieldantur2719 Ship It!
Yes, why we have to make it more complicated. Make it quick and simple with vim (neo im)
dude really.. i'm a vim user too and after i saw this video, my relation with vim got stronger.
just saying. you never see dt and luke smith in the same room.
But they are in the same boomer backyard.
Luke Smith !
Emacs is more of an environment vs vim is an editor.
Exactly !
When you just want to have an editor that deels well with your terminal, you don't need more than vim
Right! „Emacs is a great operating system, lacking only a decent editor.“ is the saying.
My environment is GNU/Linux, the operating system.
@@thingsiplay in that case you should install an editor asap ;).
@@vesder819 It comes pre-installed with many editor tools.
"emacs is a fine operating system in need of a good editor"
@@wafficuslives6701 it's just a famous quote I find amusing
I don't use either day to day and live most of the time in Sublime Text.
Edited for reduced grumpiness,with apologies
Which could prolly be written in elisp. The gift that keeps on giving.... ah, Emacs.
It's a great quote because it must have been said by somebody who really understands emacs.
Which is why I use spacemacs with vim key bindings.
Evil mode comes close!
Thanks finally somebody big articulate this correctly - THIS IS AN ELISP ENTERPRETER
You forget to add GUI - i.e. It's a GUI LISP INTERPRETER.
it's Interpreter
@@grapesalt Yes but it is GUI? not CLI interpreter. VIM is CLI EDITOR. For me is important - VIM is not Graphical Editor/ I mean if in linux you;ll have error on X server (x.org) emacs will not start.
@Robert Pilgrim My point is - initially Emacs is GUI application? and Vim is cli editor. I'm not trying to convince that smth is better or not. If you install Emacs you have a Gui application.
@@mikesa7719 I believe emacs was written to run in the terminal initially. GUI emacs was developed much later. It is a software written in the 80s, GUI was not the primary environment for hackers.
What are the benefits of Emacs over Vim?
*Is this some kind of a overcomplicated people's thing I'm too of a Nano user to understand?*
Little update: I started learning really basic stuff about Vim and watching DT's _kind of_ obsession over Doom Emacs and ORG mode made me go back to graphical IDEs lmao
no.
I think the best thing you can do is using whatever application best suits your workflow irrespective of who says what.
Give micro a try too.
Tbh if you use nano it will be trivial for you to start using Vim to do literally everything that nano does. They're both CLIs, and the only thing you need to know is how to get into insert mode and out back to normal mode - which is as simple as hitting i then ESC - and how to save :w, close :q or ZQ, and save and close :wq or ZZ. After that it's basically the same as nano, but you'll realise there is no glass ceiling and you can use it in more and more advanced ways. I use Vim, so I don't know if you can jump into emacs with similar ease - I'll leave that for others to comment.
Master nano user here, who needs vim or eMacs those editors have so many features you’ll probably never use half of them … ill choose simplicity and elegance over those two.
I don't understand the emacs vs. vim war. Such a waste of energy. The most important thing is that they aren't using garbage from microsoft.
echos from the great neckbeard wars of the early 90's
I think you explained perfectly why I don't like emacs. If emacs is an environment in which I can do anything....why not just do that thing in Linux? Why add another layer of bloat on top of it?
Not to be that guy but I'm gonna be that guy. Its because Linux is just the kernel. Emacs can run on top of Linux kernel to be a desktop env, and pretty much everything else
@@KManAbout hey whatever works best for you is the best solution :)
@@bardus_hobus truer words have hardly been said.
@@KManAbout out of curiosity, have you used exwm? I want to know if it's practical to use emacs to that extreme, since if I am to use it I'd rather have it be my wm without any overhead
@@opposite342 I haven't used exwm, I know people who have and appreciate it though. I can't say I would recommend it, mostly because I am a stumpwm and commonlisp fan hhahha.
This is the first explanation of the difference between vim and emacs I’ve ever seen that has actually helped me understand why I would want to use one over the other. Didn’t they have an old saying like, “Vim is an editor, emacs is an operating system.”
"Lacking only a decent editor" was the full joke, i think
He's basically comparing vim without plugins to emacs with plugins. It's an unfair comparison. Vim has plenty of cool plugins as well. It is more limited though because elisp is more powerful than vimscript (Neovim has Lua now though) and vim is not GUI, so it can't show images and stuff. Vim is much more fast and lightweight though, is a much better editor by default (not counting emacs evil mode here obviously), and runs better in a terminal. There's a reason why DT uses doom emacs and not default emacs. Default emacs sucks and you need to write a loooong config file to turn it into something like doom emacs :)
@@maxarendorff6521 He actually mentioned that Emacs has a steep learning curve. Doom Emacs eases the process. One can learn vim in a week. But to really understand the power of emacs it takes months. But once you get there, emacs will feel much more powerful than vim.
@@SenthilBabuji I tried Emacs, but switched back to Neovim. It's not for me. Too slow, doesn't run well in a terminal, huge pain to configure...
@@maxarendorff6521 no, it is a fair comparing vim and Emacs. (And you couldn't bother learning Emacs, so just say that and don't make up excuses like "too slow", or doesn't run well in terminal or "pain to configure". Just admit, you are not the man up for the job. ;-D )
Because one argument of using vim is that it are in all Linux server. But then you need to copy the configuration between your servers.
You can edit files on remote servers with Emacs without copy configuration to those servers, nor install Emacs. Just open the file /ssh:user@server:file will use ssh to open the file on server, as it was local. And with M-x shell you got a shell on that machine.
Vimscript is less powerful, because you are not changing vim. When you write elisp extensions, you are actually changing Emacs. So no, vimscript isn't even comparable.
That vim is faster and mire leightweight are debatable, so are to claim it is better by default. And no, it doesn't run better in terminal, actually there are no major difference between the running in terminal.
Default Emacs IS the same Emacs as Doom Emacs, there would not be a Doom Emacs, if there was not a default Emacs.
Just acknowledge, you are not the man to run Emacs, or configure Emacs to suit your workflow. You are not just up for the task, so you make lots of excuses. ;-)
(And yes, Doom Emacs and Spacemacs are bloated ;-) ). Just go to System Crafter channel and read up on Emacs, I know you can learn Emacs too, if you want to.
I'm an Emacs user for more than 7 years now. Before that I used Vim for about 3 years. However, it's not Vim that I switched from to Emacs. It was actually Eclipse (I don't think it's even that relevant nowadays in the VSCode era). I used Eclipse as an IDE and Vim as an editor. I still use Vim for elementary editing on remote machines. And more or less that's the only thing that frustrates me in the Emacs world; tramp mode is slow.
use the tool only if you need it
DT: _What Are The Benefits Of Emacs Over Vim?_
Unaboomer: _What Are The Benefits Of Vim Over Everything?_
What are the benefits of emacs over vim? - People don't understand emacs and don't know all the keybindings, it's too hard.
Ok.jpg
That quote at the bottom "I showed you my source code, pls respond" I love it.
I'm kind of interested in Emacs, however I haven't learnt it because I'm not sure it would be worth it for my needs. Vim serves my purposes well enough, and sometimes the learning curve is not proportional to the advantages it gives you. It may be something I'll look into at some point, but for the moment, there's other things that I will be better served by sinking my time into.
One one hand that could very possibly be true, OTOH by that logic you probably shouldn't have learned vim in the first place.
@@jaredsmith5826 I disagree. I saw some videos that showed the advantages of Vim over a standard text editor, and I thought that it would be worth learning it. Furthermore, to learn the basics of Vim takes half an hour or so, maybe even less. From there, if you need to do something but don't know how, a quick Google search is really all you need to do. From everything that I have been told about Emacs, it takes a lot longer to get as proficient with it, and the stuff that can be done beyond what Vim can do just isn't what I require.
I have one doubt, can we do global searches in vim for all the files in the directory? Like how we use ctrl+shift+F in VScode.
@@JRCSalter if you only want to edit within Emacs, you can get going with the same time limit. Nothing strange there, and you don't need to handle the multi mode thing.
And as with vim, everything from there is just a google away.
So if you call that to be proficent in Emacs, then they are about the same. The different thing is that to contionu from there, vim has limits, serious limits. You have your set of settings, that is it. You have vimscript, but that is just what vim allows you to use through the API. You can't really change vim.
Emacs your configuration is basically you rebuildning Emacs to suit you, you are making the program yours. All configuration you do, are actually changing the program. All the elisp code will be part of Emacs, no way of knowing that your additions are yours or coming from the developers of Emacs, because Emacs is built in elisp.
So there are the most fundamental difference between vim and Emacs. There are no limits what you can change, compared to vim.
That is why you have several adaptions of key vi key bindings to Emacs, and I have seen none for Vim. Because that isn't part of the API you are allowed to use. And no, I wouldn't recommend vim to new users, unless they are not able to learn the Emacs key bindings, which are as natural as vim. But in another plan, as they are not limited to the keyboard layout, they are "logical" in another way. You can switch keyboard layout and still be able to use Emacs as before. Not so much in vim, as it is based on keyboard layout (like the h, j, k ,l in one row to move cursor).
@@JRCSalter I'm an avid Emacs user, but I will say, it can be overwhelming to get into if you're not interested in having an essentially infinite feature set. If the necessary feature set is covered by Vim, there's no reason you need to learn Emacs, unless you want to learn it for fun.
For me, Org mode, Calc, and Magit are all irreplaceable to me. They looked amazing. That's why I personally switched.
I don't need to get Emacs, there is no function that it can fill that is missing from my workflow or that isn't being done well enough by existing tools. I am sure to those that use it, it's a very good application, but I will still give it a pass.
I agree with you. I also think that Emacs doesn't actually follow the Unix philosophy.
@@teunissenstefanYeah, it doesn't seem quite like it... It feels too monolithic, it is trying to be so many things at once... Vim follows better the unix philosophy, you have a simple shell of an text editor and you simply extend it with the things you need, it does not come pre-bloated for you, you use what you need
I won't understand it for 6 months? Sounds very appealing.
Unix philosophy: Programs do one thing and do it well.
Emacs: No.
I disagree. Emacs does one thing well, it interprets elisp. The side effect of that is that it can do anything else you want, which makes it appear like it's not following the unix philosophy.
@@yramagicman675 I disagree. Emacs interprets multiple programs that happen to be written in the same language.
You don't consider all Java* programs to be 'one' because they are all interpreted by the JRE now would you?
(*or any interpreted language).
But lets not get our panties in a twist here... it was just a joke and Emacs is pretty awesome.
emacs is the best example of the gnu philosophy. and a prime counterexample of the UNIX philosophy.
Good thing GNU is not Unix 😏
@@qvindicator 😂👍
I was using emacs before vim, but the main reason I switched to vim, is emacs is just slow sometimes. I mean painfully slow, and it's usually really easy for plugins to hang it or something. Vim is just fast, it either works or it doesn't, but it's never slow.
Thats because you generally want to run it as a daemon
Vim can be slow, too. I switched to Emacs 5 years ago because Vim was starting and running agonizingly slowly with all the plugins I was using and due to the platform I was running on (Cygwin). Running Emacs in server mode was actually faster and gave me everything I wanted. Today, my Emacs config is over 10,000 lines, I use hundreds of packages, and I never experience performance issues.
smart guy ... the fan-boys will explain that you can always find and fix the slowdown, but why spend your time doing that ? the vim system - once you practice it - i cannot live without it. i use Emacs with evil-mode, but Emacs is more a pass-time than a productive entity. if you like to write elisp, than it has advantages - only than.
I used to use emacs for a few years. I think the issue I have with it is that I always always messing around with my configuration and not getting work done. As I've gotten older, I realise I much less stressed with minimal tools. Now I use neovim. I've got a focused configuration with just the right number of plugins and I don't have to mess with it. Emacs feels like I'm using VSCode or something. Just so much going on everywhere. It's not what I want. I just want a good text editor that can I move fast in. That's it. tmux and neovim. That's all I need.
@@darthvader1191so the fix for emacs is actually called evil.
@@darthvader1191 What would I bother with a Neovim simulcrum that runs slower if I can just use Neovim? Also, not a skill issue. I used it for three years in evil mode.
Both are masterpiece, it's your freedom to choose one.
I chose mode
The only based answer in this cringe comment thread
I was an emacs user for 5 years. But changed to vim and separate tools a few years ago. I tried to get back into emacs last year, but found I really couldn’t anymore.
I think it should be left to those who have complete freedom to setup things how they like otherwise the separate programs are just too hard to keep up with.
why ?, Is it because you loves vim more than emacs?
@@noyalmartin9729 in the end I found that I like simple tools and the flexibility they provide better than complex ones. After having used separate tools for some time, I can’t seem to wrap my head around all those integrated stuff in emacs anymore. It feels to monolithic to me. None of the tools in emacs were better than the separate ones. And org mode is so much its own ecosystem that it doesn’t integrate well with anything outside emacs. Living in emacs and org mode is all very well if you live behind your computer 24/7 and don’t use any other devices.
@@mke7605 helpful, thanks for sharing
@@mke7605 also, emacs doesnt have a decent terminal emulator, which i would really miss considering i have a shortcut for popping a terminal in neovim
I use Emacs with evil-mode which I think can combine both pros. And the most important reason that I use Emacs is I really like Lisp, It’s elegant and powerful.
well said Mob!
If you would show this comment to a Victorian child in the Industrial Revolution they would’ve spontaneosuly combusted into thin-air
I actually don't like lisp all that much. Between having parentheses everywhere and having everything in infix notations it is very hard to read.
I get that in lisp everything is a function call hence the syntax is perfectly logical, but I don't think it's doing itself any favors in terms of readability.
I still do love Emacs. It's great to be able to do everything within one customizable environment using the same bindings everywhere, I just wish it was built on a an easier language to use.
you got it. god bless you. anyone who does not want to learn and write elisp will find zero real advantages in Emacs over better ide's.
I love Org Mode as a DM. World building, campaign notes, character sheets. The uses of Org are endless. I have installed Emacs on any OS supported because of how good Org is.
I tried Spacemacs for a few years but.. though org mode was cool, other stuff like web browsing or email work kind of like your example in this video opening a site. The consistency of a pure lisp environment is great but in the end it is a text editor and coming back to Vim brought me a great feeling of being back home 🤷♂️
this is my last comment here ... by accident or no, the vi system - extended with vim is close to an AI created scheme for keyboard manipulation of text. once you learn it you hate using the mouse, though i tolerate the mouse for everything else.
I just need a text editor.
I don't code. I don't need an IDE.
I don't even care what language is anything written in.
I don't need my text editor to run packages. Nor to run any kind of code.
I need a text editor.
One that has some advanced text manipulation features, because I'll use it to edit text! I don't care if emacs can do everything I can dream of. I just need to edit text and do it efficiently and then close it, and continue with my job and my life.
So I use vim.
Thanks anyway, now I know I don't ever need to worry if I would be better using emacs, now I know I won't.
Mee toooo
You might as well keep drooling and use Gedit. There's no hope for you.
All hail Saint IGNUcius, of the Church of Emacs!
No, I don't like RMS.
@@vorrnth8734 then stop using linux.
@@rizkyadiyanto7922 I can't even though I indeed prefer FreeBSD.
*pulls the alpine linux copypasta*
@@aldotovar9231 I use Alpine with GNU coreutils :)
I think the question is vim + other command line tools vs emacs. Like there are terminal basted productivity apps that are not part of vim like taskwarrior while org mode is part of emacs
Hey DT. It was your channel that a few years back convinced me to take the plunge and learn VIM. I love VIM now and just don't want to change and learn something new all over again. Even with using VIM bindings in Emacs. Just don't care. My Linux setups are how I like them and my VIM is set up with a dozen plugins and tweaked to IMO PERFECTION. I think emacs is interesting and the thought of using it as the entire window manager and os seems like it would be fun to experiment with but I just don't want to take the time. There is just other fun to be had.
Interesting. I used emacs for some years and loved the org-mode - as a task manager, as a PKM, as a journal, as an environment for literate programming. At first I used pain emacs, later on I fiddled around with evil-mode and spacemacs - and finally I ended up in doom.
Then I asked myself why do I need that obstruction? With the help of the command line I can almost do everything I want. Thus I switched to vim and since approx two years are quite happy with kakoune.
org-mode in terminal? how?
we come back to the linux commandline. that is the mother and as everyone says ... the advantage is scripting. elisp is hardly an improvement over basic linux utilities.
why bother? nano is all you need
Use Emacs with Evil Mode, give the Operating System the Editor it deserves.
Neovim is getting there, we already have magit on neovim and some prototypes on org mode
I started out using vim, and I really love the modal editing and memorable shortcuts. Whenever I need to use another editor/IDE, the first thing I do is install vim keybindings. At some point, I had to use Emacs for an AI class at university, and, as usually, I installed vim keybindings and fell in love. So now, I use Emacs with vim keybindings, and it's amazing. I'm currently in the process of moving all my todos and schedules into org-mode and org-roam and it's very promising.
In conclusion, there really is no reason to chose between vim and Emacs. You can have the best of both. The only time I still use vi(m) is when I have to edit a file on a remote server because stock Emacs is pretty unusable to me if its even installed.
Im glad I found this comment after seeing the one with almost 800 likes of people just hating on Emacs.
If everything said in the video is true, it just makes sense to figure out how to get vim binding to work with Emacs so you can get the best of both worlds.
Seriously I found this comment very insightful.
I've used many different editors on and off over the last decade or so. I'm a programmer and have worked on many solo projects, within teams, in many different contexts, many different languages, with many different goals. I've used everything you can think of for years at a time. Vim, Emacs, even VS Code for a few years, Kakoune editor... I "editor" hop even more than I window manager hop. Emacs is great, and of the one's I listed, it's the most powerful by far. But my issue with it is that it can get slow. I can't easily justify that or have patience for that when there are other tools in my environment and I'm already using a tiling window manager. I don't need my git client to be in the same window as my editor, because my entire desktop is my workspace. Emacs is amazing, but the slowness, even just a little bit of slowness, kills it for me.
Then look at Emacs 28, which have JIT compilation to native code.
Me too. Even neovim is slow sometimes especially with async plugins and LSPs. Somehow Helix didn't seem to have that problem for me but it's a bit less configurable and I miss easy motions and other plugins.
That's okay. As a Nano user, i understand neither of those two. ;-)
The virgin Emacs and vim users vs the Chad nano user
Everybody: Vim or Emacs
Me:
*nervous in nano and kate*
Ahem ... Doom Emacs (and all the rest) **IS** GNU Emacs. It's just been configured to work a certain way. Just like my own GNU Emacs is still GNU Emacs even though it has had more than a decade of me messing with its configuration.
I've been watching the channel for almost 3 months. Most of the time I keep DT's video open as a background sound while working. Now I even watch it on bed before sleeping. My girlfriend started to question me: Is this bald man that interesting? Guys, how should I response?
Yes, yes he is.
Yes
Don't respond, she is a hallucination.
If you respond, you'll make the illness stronger.
And in case you're wondering how could I be sure that your "girlfriend" is a hallucination: um, you're on a video dealing with emacs vs. vim...
DT emacs video drinking game:
take a shot every time he says "emacs"
Moonshine is gone, but got one hell of a fro. Luke Smith just arrived to make me use bash
Thanks, I'm glad they have wifi in the hospital while I'm treated for alcohol poisoning and getting my stomach pumped. 🙃
@@mikereynolds1368 you must live above the Mason-Dixon Line.
Alcoholism is bad mmkay
@@leviticus8930 why do jokes work differently up north? :)
I think the real question is Emacs vs Terminal Emulators. The thing is... I don't need a full operating system installed on top of my operating system. I write code, and Vim allows me to do that efficiently and its awesome. I'm sure Emacs is awesome too... but is i really worth the learning curve? I doubt it for my needs. I haven't even reached the full depth of what vim can do after 6 years of using it, i don't think I need something deeper.
Yes, it is worth the learning curve. Is Emacs needed for what you do, I don't know. But it will defenitly add and change what you do on your computer and in your workflow.
And of course, you can do the same thing in Emacs, as it has access to several terminal emulators in Emacs, unless you want to run Emacs or Vim in them... ;-)
Neovim with lua support now probably opens up much more options
doesn't change the fundamentals though, emacs and vim are the literal opposites. vim is a text editor with an extension language slapped on top, emacs is a programming language with a text editor slapped on top
@@ricknaam5658 It's an arbitrary distinction. DT is such an Emacs fanboy, but even he doesn't use default Emacs because that is also just a text editor (and not a very good one). If you want all the fancy features, you have to install doom emacs or write thousands of lines of config yourself to turn emacs into something more than a text editor.
I've been "using" emacs for about 2 months now. I say "using" because I'm still learning. I think it escapes definition because it is developed in multiple directions: as a platform for running elisp (write your scripts in elisp, not bash), as an elisp IDE (debug code, inspect values), as a UI framework (it is much more developed in how it interprets keys than vim), and as a text editor (ie, it has a rich elisp API for editing text); it can even be your tmux and your window manager (through EXWM).
If you just want to edit text with no fuss, vim is better, but if you're like me and liked all the plugins and extra functionality vim acquired recently, I advise you to not waste time and start learning emacs. You're writing all that Lua to get vim to be just perfect, but eventually you'll hit ceilings. Emacs has a taller ceiling, you won't be as limited, but you need to invest a lot of time into it to pay off.
I've used VIM for 18 years now and I honestly still don't get Emacs. I have long ago come to the conclusion that life is simply to short to spend six months learning something with the complexity of an operating system to edit a text file. Einstein said that nothing is so complex that it cannot be explained simply but that was long before Emacs.
It took me 20 seconds to learn how to edit anything text file in emacs. Not sure where you went wrong 18 years ago...
While regular vim or vscode users get excited when they use their editors as an IDE, emacs users get excited when they use their editor as an entire operating system.
Or at least as a Tilled Window manager. 🙂
Yeah, because when I'm editing a project in six different windows on 6 different servers in six different languages in vim with everything just autoformatting perfectly, it really sucks that I can't play tetris right then and there. ;)
my friend, it is an illness. ... i need a therapist.
but, what if you just want an editor?
You still have that in Emacs. And if you start Emacs in server mode, you can easy and fast start editing files.
Then just stick with vim or switch to neovim because it has more stuff
@@willardorwud not more stuff then Emacs.
@@AndersJackson Pretty sure he means neovim has more stuff than vim.
@@AndersJackson Of course neovim doesn’t have as much stuff as emacs, but for a lot of users emacs is overkill
I'm kind of interested in Emacs, yet still I don't understand it.
What's the point of having all the emacs versions of programs that we already have? Why do I need emacs browser if I have firefox / qutebrowser / tor? Why does one need two or more emacs terminal emulators if he can use st / alacritty / urxvt etc?
As for Magit and org mode - there is vim-fugitive and some plugins which simulate org mode for vim.
I don't understand why emacs include tetris, snake and so on? Isn't it the same as getting the bicycle which would also be kind of washing mashine?
Isn't it better to use for each specific task the tool which fits this task better? I can edit text with Vim, browse internet with Librewolf, view images with sxiv and pdfs with zathura.
Came here to just read the comments ...
Getting back to NeoVim again with more confidence
I think that neovim is heading in the emacs direction with lua rather than e-lisp. There are also some aspects of the design of neovim that are better than emacs in that there are aspects of emacs that are hacks ontop of hacks. Both are great but for the moment I am looking forward to the advances in neovim more than emacs. I spent a chunk of time in emacs before returning to neovim.
Hack upon hack? Don't agree, except for my own configuration.
And when you set up your configuration and hack your setup, you actually make that part of Emacs, you are actually changing Emacs. vim and vimscript are just you talking to the vim program. You are not allowed to do anything there are not a API for.
That is the most fundamental different between Emacs and Vim.
@@AndersJackson Genuinely curius, what's something I couldn't do in vim because there's no API for it?
@@noname-dt6sv write an email client in vim. Write an web browser in vim. Write Tramp in vim, write Org-mode in vim. etc etc etc.
That is not how vim works, so no, you can't.
Emacs is designed to be expandable, by execute code in the program, to have a REPL in it from the beginning. Where you by execute code change the program you are running. That is is so good documented so it actually makes ordinary non programmers able to write non trivial expansions to Emacs. By try out the expansion while they write it.
Yes, vim have a nice set of key bindings, IF you can manage the multiple mode settings, which is origin because of older editors run on computers that didn't had the power to run in "video mode". That is why you have the different modes in vim, by accident it was quite ok.
Yes you could retrofit most of the extensions into vim, but that is just hacks made after they have been developed in other tools, like in Emacs.
Sorry, but that is what vim are. Some nice key bindings on on rather simple editor. Compared to Emacs.
Yes, that might be the tool for you, and then I am happy for you. But don't try to make vim into something it clearly isn't because you want stuff that are in Emacs, but not in vim.
@@noname-dt6sv yes, you probably will claim that vim also have an expansion language, or several. But you know, that is just an after thought, and not as good as the Lisp repl that is Emacs.
Okay, ORG mode got my attention, i`ll add to my list of stuff to study
thanks for your video but i was watching one of your video regarding emacs "Friendship With Emacs Is Over, Vim Is My Best Friend" and now this, is it the same emacs with evo mode or something else ?
_Oh I forgot to show tetris in Emacs!_
You got me there, DT
Woah! You just blew my mind with all of that git stuff! I'm going to have to try doing my git stuff in emacs now! Totally cool!
Good luck, man. Magit is really good. You can do everything the git command can do, only this time with single keystrokes. It's the fastest way to use git. Also, it's hands-down the fastest way to commit only parts of changes. Tab-open the changed file to see the diff, mark the part of the diff you want to stage and press 's' to stage. Done.
Also, forget about what people say about having to live in emacs. It's not required. It all depends on your needs. Right now I myself am perfectly happy using emacs just for org mode and magit and coding in VSCode.
That being said, I did spend quite some time learning Emacs and getting it configured the way I wanted. There's no way around that. But it will pay dividends in the end.
I've never been so deterred from using emacs... Thanks. 👍
💯🤣
@@saravananm2280 For what it's worth, I now use emacs for almost everything. The video was a bad introduction to what is otherwise an awesome piece of software for certain types of people.
Give emacs a try if you're interested.
I have seen enough to decide not to use Emacs and stay in Vim. It is just not for me.
Same reason why qtile or xmonad is much more powerful than i3. No, don't tell me you have exwm.
Do qtile and xmonad do much more than i3 that i3 cannot do ?
@@Hexalyse yes. For instance I have written a lot of code that defines how my layout should be changed based on whether I have only laptop screen or have I connected an external monitor. I also have some robust resizing mechanisms based on the window type. These are not so easy to achieve with i3. I use qtile by the way.
@@rennessaince357 I am not a big fan of binary tree data structure that bspwm uses. It is always confusing to manipulate that structure. For me, it is not the right structure to manage windows. I am better off with just a list.
@@Hexalyse my point exactly! All this talk about layouts, but it means nothing to me. I never have more than two applications on a workspace: one to the left and one to the right. i3 does that perfectly.
@@SenthilBabuji I was gonna say it's equally possible with i3 if you write code to do it anyway... but I must say, resizing in i3 is a pain and what you talk about, I'd love to do (default non 50/50 tiling depending on window class etc)
"emacs is a fine operating system but it lacks a good editor"
It all ends up overly complicated and feels bloated to me, I know it technically isn't,but I still rather use my shell to do the integrations and automations and have a light and snappy editor on vim, but if I didn't have that workflow, Emacs would be a cool centralised option.
Noob: I would like a text editor
Emacs Salesman: and what games will you be playing in your text editor?
What you are referring to as Emacs is in fact Vim/Emacs, or Vim + Emacs...
I'd like to interject for a moment...
I went back to Neovim after using Emacs for a while. It is powerful, but it is a pain trying to force Emacs into being something it is not, like with Evil, but without Evil, it is unusable. Neovim ist fast and lightweight, easier to configure and works better in a terminal, which is my preferred way of doing things. And now with lua integration, Neovim is more powerful than ever. Org is cool, but I didn't really use most of it's advanced features so pandoc+markdown+neovim works really well for me.
DT: Everything you can do with vim, you can do with emacs. The reverse is not true.
Also DT: proceeds to show us 10+ different things that can now be done with neovim...
...nice
No, it can't, and that is because of how the programs are designed.
Vim are basically use these configurations that we have allowed. Write scripts that can do these things we allow, where we are the coders of vim. That is fine, and most programs are like that.
Emacs is quite different there. There you have no limit what you can change, because you are CODING the settings. There are no way you can see the difference between the changes I do and what is delivered with Emacs, unless you know what file it comes from. I am programming my configuration. I am EXTENDING Emacs code base with the extensions. Nothing that can be done in vim or neovim.
So no, you can't do all the things Emacs can. That might be enough for you, what do I know? But it is not the same, vim can't do what Emacs can. Because you don't edit/appending to the C code that vi/im/neovim whatever when you configure vim or add packages to it. That is basically what you do when you configure Emacs, change the code that builds Emacs.
But if that is all you need, then use vim. But doen't pretend things that isn't true, just because you don't need it/doesn't use it/can't understand the difference.
@@AndersJackson
> Emacs is quite different there, because you are CODING the settings...
No, it's not...everything you said in that paragraph is true of vim too.
Situation with Emacs:
The base editor is written in C. It also provides a language for configuring it (elisp), and the default configuration is included in the codebase, comprising just over half of the total code in the repo. Using this language, you can customize many aspects of the editor, but only the aspects that the programmers of emacs allow you to.
Situation with Neovim:
The base editor is written in C. It also provides languages for configuring it (vimscript and lua), and the default configuration is included in the codebase, comprising just over half of the total code in the repo. Using these languages, you can customize many aspects of the editor, but only the aspects that the programmers of neovim allow you to.
Oversimplification? Maybe. But it's all true. The difference in customizability is only temporary, and the gap is closing fast. The things that you can change about emacs but you can't about vim/neovim aren't there because it's impossible to allow those kinds of changes because of the structure of the code or something like that, but simply because the programmers for vim/neovim haven't yet allowed that to be changed (or because it's not a vim/neovim problem, but a terminal one, but that's a different discussion).
@@thaddaeusmarkle1665 you are a vim user, read the title of the video. 🙂
No, the editor is written in elisp, the lisp system is written in C, like in most Lisp implementations I know of. Yes, some lisps have compilation stages and thus can compile Lisp in Lisp. So you are wrong. AND you can always replace a C implementation with one written in Lisp, if you want to. And there are lots of ways to add code to change the behavior you don't like or want to have.
You just don't know Emacs, and that is ok. But don't try say they are the same, because they are not. And that is ok. I can't understand vim users that complain that Emacs is different? Isn't that why you use vim? That is why I use Emacs.
And I have not said that the API of vim can't be expanded, it can. But you are still dependent on what the vim developers choose to allow you to expand/exchange/rewrite/replace. In Emacs that is not up to the Emacs developers.
The gap is closing fast? I don't think so, because Lisp is by design easy to change while you run it, and you only need to write those changes in a language, that has been designed for expansion the system since the beginning of Emacs. Vim has not.
And that is ok to be different.
@@AndersJackson
> No, the editor is written in elisp, the list system is written in C...
Actually, I'm looking at the codebase right now...as far as I can tell, all of the elisp files are one of three things: defining the built-in "commands" or "functions", or whatever you call the things you can run from the M-x prompt; defining default "modes" for different filetypes; or default "plugins" and minigames like tetris. The C files, on the other hand, are things like search.c, which handles searching, keymap.c, which allows setting keybindings, and xterm.c which handles the builtin terminal. All of those things are low-level "core" editor features...unless I'm missing something, that looks an awful lot like the base editor is written in C...
So you're right, I'm not an emacs user, and you probably know much more about how the editor works than I do. But as much as vim users don't understand emacs, I think it's just as true that emacs users who moved from vim to emacs before neovim was where it is today don't understand what huge strides neovim has made in the last two years or so. And that's what I mean when I say the gap is closing fast. Work is actually being done to do almost specifically that. Lua was introduced to provide a faster, more convenient way to extend the editor, and it does that just fine. Neovim and vim are now very separate editors, with different communities, different maintainers, and different methods of configuration. And that's what emacs users don't understand about neovim.
SOMEONE LINKS THIS TO LUKE SMITH !!!
I love both, but the only reason I use vim is the slow startup time if emacs stresses me to death.
that has a simple solution, doom emacs as a emacs-server then it will start faster than vim.
and that also tells me you are running either mac or windows, because emacs in Linux is so damn fast, even with spacemacs starts fast.
@@lupuscanis4370 oh cool! I havnt used anything but linux the past 10 years though. Maybe because I had a lot of configuration on emacs.
@@12kenbutsuri and I have used linux for 22 years, so what.
@@lupuscanis4370 wow, you have some socializing issues don't you lol from your comments, I can tell you are probably not even good at coding, with all your big assumptions ;p
@@12kenbutsuri well you are so slow or why would you assume I'm here to socialize, I'm using a disposable account, seriously.
The only thing needed in emacs is a user friendly text editor
My text editor doesn't require two trimesters and a strong background in lambda calculus to appreciate :)
Just use nano so you can piss off both camps and laugh your butt off while you watch them argue over something that doesn't matter.
"And that's it, we just pushed our changes to git" ROFL! So simple!!!
I started using vi in the 90s. It edits files
I need to edit files, why would I need to play games or anything else?
I still don't get it tbh, there's a lot of other programs out there that could do what emacs has to offer but better, so why use it? Vim and Noevim offers vim motions which is the most optimised way of navigating code without the use of a mouse, it is one of the main reasons why most people use them, it also offers various plugins that can do what emacs has to offer as well, so what advantage does it truly have? I kinda want to see the coding workflow of emacs to see if it's better than the coding workflow of vim/Neovim. If I can code better and faster in emacs compared to Neovim, then I'll gladly migrate to emacs.
Also, VIM/NeoVIM are terminal based and you get benefits of integrating them with tmux.
"Emacs is an emacs lisp interpreter." This flipped a switch in my head. I realized that emacs is an emacs lisp interpreter initially configured as a text editor. I also realized after watching another Emacs video that the Vim editing model is more coherent at the fundamental editing level. These two combined, i.e. Emacs with Evil mode makes a ton of sense to me. Vim has been helpful in providing a coherent keyboard based editing system while emacs provides all the higher order features that a crucial to any workflow beyond editing. Thank you for your clarifying presentation.
I've been using Emacs for about 30 years. I recently switched to Neovim, and I don't ever want to go back to Emacs.
The maker of this video probably doesn't know about Neovim. Apart from multiple font sizes in the same terminal (is that really that abig thing), everything he showed in Emacs you can do in Neovim.
Programming in Elisp isn't very user-friendly. The code is hard to read and debug. Programming in Lua (in Neovim) is so much more pleasant.
I must add, I didn't notice this isn't a recent video. My comments may or may not have been valid at the time the video was posted.
Thanks for the explanation. Yes, I definitely won't use Emacs.
The biggest difference is vim work without any configuration, barebone emacs is horrible to use.
vim is better suited for sysadmin task, you can still used emacs for that with tramp-mode but vim with good terminal knowledge is better.
emacs is better for programming tasks, emacs configured correctly is an IDE, vim is not.
emacs is by far the most configurable text editor out there, it's is main strength and its main weakness, you need a tremendous amount of time to make it work for you and not against you
I am used to be a vim user, but I dislike emacs because of the most commonly stated reason: too much stuff is built there...
It reminds me vscode which can be anything with extensions, but emacs is anything even without extensions!
I just get lost and defocused with such a variety of features that I did not want to install.
But emacs is a great text editor anyway, I like the way it manages navigation, key bindings, commands and even clipboard.
Kill-Ring is what I always wanted in a text editor since I always worry about what I've cut/copied and carrying around while coding.
Learning is not bad. But why do I have to learn so much about my most common tools? When do I start working?
Vim seems harder to learn to me. Modal editing and single key commands. Weird navigation.
after watching this video i can confidently say that i will... keep using geany 😅
Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping
EMACS Makes A Computer Slow
Escape Meta Alt Control Shift
ed/vi/vim is on every system, knowing how to use it means you can edit in any environment, down to the smallest systems with any kind of read/write filesystem
I am usually programming bare metal on embedded. Dude, you have no idea what a "small system environment" looks like. Debugging happens with a DSO and a logic analyzer. Oh... wait... you don't know how to use those for software development. ;-)
I totally get the benefits of emacs
I just dont get the benefits thats worth getting the emacs pinky over
Neovim with some plugins/env may already offer it's alternatives though:
1) orgmode? -> nvim-orgmode + plugins for appearance & code evaluation
2) magit? -> vim-fugitive or similar plugins
3) images? -> nvim + kitty graphics protocol + hologram.nvim, etc
4) web browser? -> nvim + kitty graphics protocol + awrit
5) remote session? -> nvim with scp
6) which key? -> which-key.nvim
7) search anything? -> telescope with its plugins
The real comparison would be "emacs vs environment-of-unix-philosophy-tools", right?
It's funny the people that complain about emacs doesn't follow the Unix philosophy.
Over all because a lot of them do that commentary from browser like Firefox or Chrome, that are also the opposite to the Unix philosophy but they don't complain about those programs.
@@lorenzocabrini Emacs is an ecosystem of tools that interoperate and work together. A system of "unix-like tools", or whatever you'd like to call them, is another ecosystem of tools that work together. The two systems are alternatives to each other, so I'm saying the comparison should be between them.
This is the best pitch for Emacs I've seen so far.
Whenever contemplating on whether or not I should take a leap into Emacs and see the steep learning curve, I turn away not because of fear. I don't dive through because it usually fails my internal cost-benefit analysis. If I don't really understand what I can get out of it, why would I bother to take the time to learn it?
same. I also go like 'vim does a lot for me, and it runs on the terminal which is very close to the shell which means I have access to all my scripts and other powerful apps, also being lightning fast at the same time' and I skip on emacs.
Same. Nowadays many projects are excellent, but without a good pitch and good documentation it's going to be hard to get/maintain traction. "What's the value proposition of my/our project and how should we communicate that in a video?" should be a key question to be asked in my opinion.
there is likely no "real benefit" if you are already invested in vim.
certainly the jump from something like nano to either vim or emacs is not going to be found from going from vim to emacs.
i will however say that there is something to the gnu philosophy that people living in the linux world are generally blind to and emacs is the only real way to learn it. i have spent years in vim and went down the configuring it, etc., rabbit hole and felt like it was perfect. on a whim a year or so ago I spent about 5 months (while i was doing some pretty low urgency web dev) in emacs (vanilla) and it was pretty insightful.
that being said, my take basically was that both vim and emacs have the whole editing thing wrong for ideological reasons and have since moved to acme (plan9)
@@peacemekka M-x shell give you access to all your scripts from Emacs too. But you probably do way more stuff from Emacs anyway.
@@viardent8823 acme, it that like Wily, an Linux implementation of a Gui editor? Wily is nice, and you build it around script you run from Wily.
Vim bigot here! I am 15 years fluent in vim, yet wouldn't call me fully learned. The help text for vim is over 200k lines.
I used emacs at university , and wrangled my fingers with all Meta-this/Meta-that. There are some great git plugins for vim that does the same thing as you did in emacs (I use the terminal git commands anyway).
If you mostly _edit_ code, I think vim is better (if you learn vim fluent). If you _write_ text, both would probably work.
Anyway, I must say the table autoformatting you show is a big thumbs up. Good for you that you like emacs. Emacs is probably very competent for what it aims to be.
There is actually a vim plugin called table mode or something. Have been using that for a while, mostly for markdown.
Emacs can be extended in elisp, neovim can be extended in any language
My biggest gripe with Emacs is the high usage of the control key. I am a total noob tho so I'm probably missing something. Vim is very intuitive and fast for me.
My text editing needs are modest. I use nano or micro for editing config files, and a graphical word processor for everything else. I have tinkered with both Vim and Emacs(I had a lecturer that wanted us to use Emacs on a programming course), but I didn't see enough of an advantage for me to persevere with them.
I had never installed both of them without having an issue...
Well, it’s just overly complicated. All I need is a virtual typewriter to put stuff onto computer, that’s it. Why would I invest days and hours into learning something that gives me one second of productivity? Using Emacs sounds to me like coding in Java - it’s very confusing, very painful, lots of bloat and terminology, but gives sense of accomplishment of something very difficult (although meaningless).
I was skeptical at first. But ever since using Doom Emacs, I actually look up extensions to Doom Emacs rather than looking up independent terminal applications.
Besides, I still have Doom Emacs and neovim installed in parallel, as I use nnn file browser, and vim is vital to the bulk renaming feature.
I don't endorse editor wars. Both are brilliant editors in their own right. Use them both, love them both.
You could bulk rename in a dired buffer too. Am I missing something. Just curious why vim is better in bulk renaming.
@@SenthilBabuji Yes, I assume you can. I haven't looked deeply into dired yet. I'm pretty comfortable using nnn, a terminal-based file manager written in C. And that one uses vim for its bulk rename feature.
@@marioschroers7318 if you open a dired window, you can make it writable, so any change you make in a file name i the buffer will be done on the files. And if you do use the multi cursor commands, you can easy make parallell edition for masive renaming in dired. Look up EmacsRock channel, where the author of that package are and has some demonstrations on how it works.
I want my ide to be only that. Emacs feels way too overkill. Like, "look! I can open an image in my ide!" yeah, I access the link and open it in the proper visualizer. A dedicated app. Specifically developed to do that.
Where has the signature DT dubstep intro/outro gone?
I feel like you're not hearing what a lot of people are saying about emacs. You're saying that its because we're afraid to fail or whatever, but literally everything you just showcased on this video can be accomplished by using programs external to vim. For example, a lot of the things you are doing in emacs, I just do with some keybindings in my window manager, shell scripting, and or external programs that have a specific purpose.
I don't understand how you say "emacs isn't a text editor" and then focus on why its better than vim. What you should be doing is focusing on why emacs is better than a window manager and shell scripting, but the problem with that is once you do that, there really isn't any advantage.
This isn't hate against you emacs users, I just don't understand why you're so hung up on comparing emacs to vim when you guys are all so adamant that its "so much more than a text editor." You can't have it both ways, it doesn't make any sense.
Are those mortal combat combos or emacs???
vim is way more simple
I don't hate emacs, it's just redundant because I already have an operating system to run apps inside of. In 2021 apps can talk to each other through the OS and don't need to be manually integrated by a team of developers the way emacs plugins are. Vim, on the other hand, I _do_ hate. It's so unbelievably obtuse. So when I need to edit text files in a terminal, I use nano, because it's easy to use unlike Vim, and it hasn't suffered from decades of requirements-creep unlike emacs.
Question is do you need Emacs when you already have GNU/Linux installed for OS stuff and VIM for text editing and development?
What I understand, Emacs users choose Emacs and uses as UNIX Utility layer. So really they could install lightest linux distro just to run Emacs, because it's their OS.
The spirit of vim/neovim is not to recreate the wheel but to fit perfectly in a set of tools already working flawlessly while doing his own purpose incredibly well which is... manipulating text. Why would I need to recreate a git system for my editor when I have... Lazygit a cli tool that I can pop inside neovim... Managing tasks ? well Taskwarrior is my friend... Because the shell and vim/neovim are just perfectly tight and on the same way of working with different tools. One tool for a task.
I've been using emacs/vim for more than 20 years. You can do exactly the same in both but just not with the same way. emacs want to build all the tools. Vim want to fit with all others already existing and thoses not even existing yet.
I prefer the vim way which is closer to the nix philosophy. Even tho I also have a vanilla Emacs setup to my taste in case I need it.
Still it can't compare to a fully featured nix environment with a poweruser behind.
If learning Emacs is not an easy task neither how to use a nix based OS at his full potential is. It is not limited to learning vim but also the other tools which are designed to work together.
An operating system is just a bootstrap for emacs in my opinion.
The original flame war! Vim vs Emacs 😁 lol
You should totally do an emacs beginners series. Like configuring it completely from scratch and such.
Try the System Crafters Chanel if you want to start configure Emacs from scratch.
He did a livestream where he configured Emacs from scratch. The video is called "Leaving Doom Emacs For GNU Emacs? - DT Live!" :)
Awesome video! I will give Emacs a try, but it feels a little bit like bloated software
How are you doing with emacs? I actually got along with it OK, but the built in psychiatric told me it was time to look for something a little more barebones.
I'm not using it yet, I have been using Vim for a while without plugins and I'm happy with it, but I will give Emacs a try when I have some time
@@ntrrg Yeah, I am happy with vim. I actually use vi(1) and ed(1) but they don't have a visual block selection, so sooner or later I go with vim.
You'll never give it a try - and that's the best thing you could do.