When the Eagles disbanded after a particularly contentious Long Beach concert where Glenn Frey and Don Felder almost came to blows, Don Henley quipped that the band would get back together when Hell freezes over. Fourteen years later the band did reunite and released their new album, Hell Freezes Over.
I was reminded of that when I read Bozhidar Batsov’s latest post on Rediscovering Vim. Most people don’t know that, like me, Batsov used Vim early in his career. He apparently didn’t stay with Vim too long because of its really hideous extension language. I was less interested in customizing my editor back then and stayed with Vim for many years.
Batsov isn’t, of course, abandoning Emacs. He just wants to “rediscover” Vim and see what he can learn from it. He started out with Neovim, which, apparently, most developers in the Vi camp are using now. But he dropped back to Vim so that he could develop his own configuration just as he had with Emacs.
Batsov likes the way Vim has the notion of “text object” and a uniform way of dealing with those objects. As I’ve said before, that’s what makes it so easy to learn and use the Vim key sequences. I don’t really miss Vim but if I did, it would be that aspect that I’d miss the most.
As I’ve also said before, I have significant muscle memory problems trying to use more than a single editor so we here at the Irreal bunker won’t be recreating Batsov’s experiment. And, really, muscle memory notwithstanding, I have no desire to. I’m perfectly happy with Emacs and indulge what little desire I have to tinker with editors to playing with my Emacs configuration.