Regular readers know that I was a Vi\/Vim user for many years before I switched to Emacs. I liked Vim and was happy with it but when I started writing in Lisp dialects, trying Emacs seemed liked a worthwhile experiment. I was pretty quickly captured by the Lisp Machine vibe that Emacs provides and have been a devoted user since.<\/p>\n
Still, I have always maintained that Vim is a great editor and the proper choice for those who want just<\/i> an editor and not an operating environment of the type that Emacs provides. The latest iteration of Vim is Neovim<\/a>, which among other things has replaced the terrible Vim extension language with Lua. I haven\u2019t used it\u2014Emacs devotee, remember\u2014but it seems like a nice evolution of the Vi\/Vim family.<\/p>\n To me, the greatest advantage of the Vi family is its composable key sequences<\/a> that make learning the editing commands relatively simple. I was, therefore, a little nonplussed by this video on Neovim and Astro<\/a>. If I had to summarize my impression in a single phrase it would be \u201cbringing Doom Emacs to Vim\u201d. The most salient feature to my mind is the substitution1<\/a><\/sup> of Vim\u2019s composable key sequences with a mishmash of Doom-like key sequences many of which aren\u2019t even mnemonic.<\/p>\n The whole thing seems ill conceived. It has a lot of Emacs features but they seem poorly implemented. For example, the first part of the video involves installing Astro and involves several iterations of restarting Neovim. Emacs users don\u2019t have to perform that dance. To channel Dennis Ritchie, if you want Doom Emacs you know where to find it.<\/p>\n Of course, some folks obviously like the system. You might too so take a look at the video. It\u2019s just over 16 minutes so shouldn\u2019t be too hard to fit in.<\/p>\n \nOr perhaps addition<\/i> would be fairer<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Regular readers know that I was a Vi\/Vim user for many years before I switched to Emacs. I liked Vim and was happy with it but when I started writing in Lisp dialects, trying Emacs seemed liked a worthwhile experiment. … Continue reading Footnotes:<\/h2>\n