Irreal

The other day I came across this video by Luke Smith challenging the rest of the world to convince him to switch from Vim to Emacs. He was very specific: he wanted videos showing Emacs in action that offer cogent arguments for abandoning Vim and moving to Emacs. He’s not interested in written arguments; he wants a video to convince him.

My immediate reaction was, “Are you kidding me?” You want me to spend a couple of hours making a video so you don’t have to bother researching the issue yourself? The whole thing reminded me of that HomeAdvisor commercial where a couple wants their neighbors to find them a contractor, do a background check, and book them an appointment.

Long time readers know that, even though I’m a hardcore believer in the Emacs way, I used Vim for many years and understand that it’s the right editor for many people. Whether to choose Emacs or Vim depends on your workflow and mindset. It’s not something someone else can decide for you, you have to try both editors out and decide which is best for you.

There are, however, folks less curmudgeonly than me who did offer videos showing why they considered Emacs the right choice. Dawid Eckert (Uncle Dave) provided not one but two videos. Uncle Dave focused mainly on how Emacs makes editing and text manipulation easy and stressed Emacs’ extensibility. He showed how it’s easy to add an editing function that he misses from Vim.

JimKD also offered a video. He stressed writing in \(\mathrm{\LaTeX}\) —important to Smith because he’s getting ready to write his thesis—and the joys of Org mode tables.

Those videos are all great and worth watching for anyone who is or wants to become an Emacs user. I especially liked seeing exwm in action in Uncle Dave’s videos. I wish there was something similar for the Mac.

The final irony is that what Smith wants was already available. If you want to see Emacs in action and some of the excellent packages available for it, Mike Zamansky’s Using Emacs Series is ideal: it’s got several relatively short videos that demonstrates the power of Emacs. If you’re interested in what Org mode can do, Rainer König’s OrgMode tutorial videos cover most of Org’s capabilities. All this is available for the watching; all you have to do is look for them. Or read about them in tweets and blogs.

Those of you who hang around Irreal know that I’m a huge fan of the Ivy/Counsel/Swiper suite. It is, by far, the most important package I have installed¹ and has improved my workflow in a major way.

Uncle Dave has a short video on searching with Swiper that shows some Swiper basics. My only problem with the video is that it doesn’t cover some of the best features of Swiper. One example of those features is the way that Swiper does a sort of “automatic regex” searching. A space in the search string is treated as .* so one two will search for any string that starts with “one” and ends with “two”. That sounds a bit odd but turns out to be extraordinarily useful. Once you get used to it, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.

Another feature that I use all the time is being able to pop up an occur buffer containing each of the candidate search targets. There’s lots more. Swiper is one of a series of utilities that use the Ivy library to handle its completion features. When you install Swiper, you get all the rest of the functionality too. Check out the Ivy manual to see what else Swiper can do and to investigate the other great functionality that Ivy brings you. Try it out; you won’t, I promise, be sorry.

The video is just a few seconds over 4 minutes so you shouldn’t have a problem finding time for it.

I saw this tweet:

Editors I use:#vim – git commits#emacs – org mode#atomeditor– work dev#vscode – side project dev (new thing)

— Thomas Mattacchione (@tmkjone) February 20, 2018

and recoiled in horror. It’s not that I think Mattacchione is doing something wrong or that I doubt he’s a good developer, it’s just that I know I couldn’t work that way.

I appreciate the idea of picking the best tool for the task at hand and it may be that Mattacchione’s choices are exactly that but I keep thinking, “How in the world does he cope with muscle memory?” I’ve been using Emacs for a decade and before that I used Vi/Vim for even longer. Only recently have I stopped doing things like using Ctrl+k to scroll back a line. That’s the result of using only two editors, not even at the same time, over several decades.

I’m sure all this says something uncomplimentary about my flexibility but it is, nevertheless, reality for me. I don’t know what I’d do if I were working in something like Java that requires—I’ve heard—an IDE to use productively.

Anyway, the tweet got me wondering about other people. Do you, like Mattacchione, use several different editors depending on what you’re doing or do you, like me, stick with one editor for all your text-based work? If you use more than one editor, do you find that muscle memory gets in the way? If you have opinions on the matter, leave a comment.