throwawayish

I’ve been using code editors for over 40 years. I’ve gone back and forth between Emacs and NeoVim/Vim.

Wow, a veteran! Thank you for sharing your insights!

In NeoVim, I’ve used all the mentioned setups and have settled on LazyVim due to it’s starting speed and ease of changing configurations around.

That's very valuable information! If it isn't too much trouble, would you mind offering me a short rundown of what you think of each?

LazyVim also requires the latest NeoVim, but it is worth upgrading to it. I use bob to manage my NeoVim versions and mostly I use the nightly version without any hiccups.

Noted.

Thanks for mentioning Helix! I've definitely considered Helix. But as 'its Vim implementation' messes the structure of its 'sentences', it seemed somewhat detrimental with respects to improving my Vi(m)-game. Furthermore, I am not confident that it will continue to thrive 20 years down the line; while both Emacs and Vi(m) have already proven with their respective track records how robust their ecosystems are.

It is missing a few features still (e.g.plugins) but I have been using helix for a while and it is really fun.

Which is another concern 😅. For whatever it's worth, I believe Lapce to be more promising.

Thank you so much for all the lovely insights you've provided! Have a good one ☺️!

Re macros. If you are editing something and you need to repeat a pattern, eg. Remove every third line or whatever, you just get to your start point and press q in command mode to start recording into macro buffer . Q to quit then you can reuse it and use it as a command with @

That's so cool!

Re fonts. It’s your terminal which controls your font in windows. In wsl, eg. The font is controlled by the external windows terminal and not by wsl. It’s dependent upon your environment I’m afraid.

Hmm..., that's unfortunate. Hopefully I can find a work-around.

Thanks a lot for your input! It has been much appreciated!

The separate config thing is nice because i can try neovim+other-megaplugins without affecting my precious lvim config. the same is true on the other side, lvim won’t bonk your core neovim config.

That's indeed very useful!

And with the keybinds, it’s to make sure the sub-plugins work well together. using lvim’s custom key config helps keep all your plugins from interfering with each other.

Makes a lot of sense!

So far, based on the comments, it seems as if LunarVim does have the biggest community (or at least the most vocal one 😜*). Which is honestly pretty cool to see!

If you have yet to do that, I strongly suggest that you go dive into using vim for a month or three before you start worrying about which plugin set you prefer.

Noted. Thank you!

For example, VSCode has a decent enough set of keybindings that it’s usable, but I still prefer console editing and on the fly macro creation.

Very interesting. Would you mind elaborating?

Speaking of which, lvim works in most terminal environments, but may require font tweaking on windows, wsl, etc.

A few weeks ago when I tried LunarVim for the first time, I had trouble assigning a different font for it than the one I prefer using in the terminal otherwise. A quick search didn't bear anything that I could use to resolve the issue. Would you happen to know if it's possible to assign a different font to LunarVim (or any Neovim distribution for that matter) than the preferred one to use in the terminal?

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.