In another Vim to Emacs story, LowCom over at the Emacs subreddit offers his take on the transition. It’s interesting because his analysis focuses on how Vim and Emacs differ. He says, as I often have, that you can’t really compare them because they are different things. Vim is an excellent, (relatively) light weight, fast editor with a wonderfully composable command set that is easy to learn and remember.
Emacs does have a builtin editor but it’s much more. Probably the best characterization is that it’s a Lisp interpreter that comes with an editor application. But the Lisp interpreter is the important part because it allows you to expand in almost any direction you like. That doesn’t mean just that you can customize the editor application; you can extend Emacs in completely different dimensions such as a mail client, an RSS reader, a Git client, a music player, a remarkably complete Zettelkasten, and almost anything else you can think of, especially if it’s text based.
Low Com doesn’t think much of the default Emacs keybindings so, of course, he uses Evil. There was some pushback on that and much of the conversation in the comments is spent on litigating that issue. I’ve used both and like both. When I moved to Emacs, I just learned the native keybindings and am glad I did. Now I know both.
The traditional argument against the Emacs keybindings are that they lead to RSI. Guys I trust, like Eric Fraga, assure me that Evil really does help combat RSI. I’ve been an Emacs user for about 15 years and spend essentially all day on my computer but have never had an RSI problem so I don’t mind the chording. Still, I understand others aren’t as lucky but as usual, Emacs lets you have it your way.