From Neovim to Emacs

I’ve written many times how I was a Vi/Vim user for many, many years. I think that I’m just now coming up to the point that I have more time with Emacs than I did with Vi/Vim. Most of my previous life was spent with Vim, although I did use the original Vi for some time.

Vi didn’t really have an extension language and Vim’s was so horrible that everybody hated it. The only configuration I did was to map function keys to do things like enter the date. It was very barebones.

But time moves on. As far as I can tell, Vim has—mostly—been replaced by Neovim, which has Lua as an extension language. I always assumed that Lua was a good extension language and was, essentially, another flavor of Lisp.

Apparently, that’s not true. Over at the Emacs subreddit, CaptainDrewBoy tells the story of his journey from Neovim to Emacs. That, and its reverse, are a familiar story, of course, but I found it worth writing about because of what CaptainDrewBoy says about Lua and the Neovim extension system in general. The thing that struck me was how hard it was to use Lua. You have to make your edit and bounce Neovim for it to take effect. If there’s a syntax error, rinse and repeat.

Contrast that with the Emacs workflow. You write your code and evaluate it. If it’s correct, it takes effect immediately. If there’s an error, Emacs informs you and you simply correct it and reevaluate the code. No need to restart you editor. It’s easy and painless.

CaptainDrewBoy says he’d even be willing to give up things like Magit and Org just for the ease in configuration. Happily, that’s not necessary. With Emacs, at least, you can have it all¹. As usual, the comments are interesting too. Take a look if you’re interested in why someone might want to move from Neovim—a perfectly fine editor—to Emacs.