Jakub Kadlčík just finished a year with Emacs. Before that, he was a Vim user for 10 years. He felt that he had reached “peak learning” with Vim except for writing plugins, which VimL made unattractive to him. Emacs’ extension language, on the other hand, is a Lisp, which Kadlčík was interested in trying.
His post, A year with Emacs, is the story of what he’s learned in that year. It resonated with me because most of his reactions were the same as mine. I didn’t opt for Evil and I hadn’t refined my workflow enough to keep a single Vim instance running all the time but otherwise his reactions were the same as mine.
It starts with keeping Emacs running all the time. If you’re used to almost any other editor it seems like a strange way to operate but with Emacs it’s the natural thing to do. It also explains why I get a bit grumpy with people who complain about the long Emacs startup time. It’s certainly longer than Vim but those few seconds are amortized over the often months-long running time of each invocation so if you’re using Emacs correctly the startup time doesn’t matter.
The other thing that really resonated with me is what Kadlčík described as Emacs giving him more Vim than he had before. By that he meant he was able to subsume many of the tasks that used to require separate apps into Emacs. That meant that he had a single unified interface (Evil/Vim in his case) for dealing with those tasks. In other words, Emacs is the ultimate IDE.
Like me, Kadlčík discovered that his system was effectively reduced to Emacs and a browser. Sure, he occasionally needs to fire up some other app but most of his work is done in Emacs or the Browser.
He also mentions:
- A literate configuration file with Org-mode
- Mu4e for email
- Circe for IRC
- Magit for dealing with Git
- Edit with Emacs to edit browser text objects with Emacs
Except for Circe and Edit with Emacs, I use all those packages. I don’t use IRC and, sadly, Safari doesn’t support Edit with Emacs or anything like it.
This post is a splendid list of what you can expect when you move to Emacs. If you’re coming to Emacs from Vim, Emacs can help ease the transition with Evil. Either way, Emacs offers a different, better workflow.