I used vim for 30 years by now, 15 of those it was my main text editor/IDE-like. I was one of those who would spend hours on achieving the perfect configuration and mix of scripts. I was one of those who thought smugly "I'm so much more productive than those idiots using Eclipse or Sublime".
But you know what? I moved to VS Code a few years ago and my productivity only increased. Everything is more intuitive and discoverable. Everything just works with no tweaking. All the convoluted macros and text manips I painstakingly crafted and memorized in vim are achievable in a few clicks in Code.
Spending 20+ hours learning emacs or vim is quite literally a waste, it's time we all admit it.
(I still think one should learn the basic cursor keys and how to save/quit in vi because sooner or later you'll have to edit something on a remote server with only vi. But learning emacs is still completely useless, though.)
> Spending 20+ hours learning emacs or vim is quite literally a waste, it's time we all admit it.
For me, with my ability to learn at the rate that I do, Emacs provides the best solutions for Git (Magit), email (mu4e), calendar (Org), to-do lists (Org), note taking (Org) and more.
And I don't use software like mu4e because I already use Emacs; I use it because I have installed and evaluated dozens of email clients over the years and concluded that mu4e is the best for me given my requirements.
For people who aren't as particular about the software they use, Emacs may very well be "quite literally a waste".
Yup. I couldn't ever use Git without Magit. The nice part about Magit is that it's already a very discoverable interface and, like Gitless, it just runs git commands asynchronously, so you can inspect the exact things Magit is doing. Yet it's very painless to blame, rebase, squash, cherrypick, ... compared to the Git CLI and other graphical tools I've tried using in the past (mostly the built-in Git interface of IntelliJ).
Given the poster mentioned using Vim for 30 years, I assume he is blindly lumping in Emacs because I've never had to maintain macros or text manipulations -- smartparens and the built-in text yanking features have been sufficient for refactoring code and structural editing.
Most of the things I do with Emacs, people will claim are doable with tmux and a dozen assorted shell utilities, which IMO is just false since you don't get any user interface or convenience close to e.g. Magit, TRAMP, notmuch, eww, and so on.
For instance, one of the supposed benefits of Vim is that you can SSH into some box without your editor of choice installed and still edit files. Why settle for such an experience when TRAMP lets you stick with your current editor, with all of its configuration and plugins, to modify files remotely?
Likewise, notmuch is very good at organizing threads across several mailing lists, whereas Thunderbird has needed me to Google dozens of questions, click lots of buttons to set up filters, and still end up with nothing better than a flat list of e-mails in my inbox.
Since my post is getting long, I'll lastly mention eww is great for browsing things like Javadoc, Codox, the Common Lisp HyperSpec, and other statically-generated HTML documentation.
The most time investment I've needed into Emacs was essentially
sudo port install emacs-app
Then asking a friend to guide me through installation of a few packages. I don't use distributions like Doom or Spacemacs, and the last time I modified my init.el was apparently 2022-05-13. I got into Emacs in 2020.
I've tried time and time again to try using VS Code so that I can help some friends get into programming languages like Clojure, but I always find myself spending 30 minutes searching how to do things I take for granted in Emacs, like automatically indenting code as you type rather than manually hitting "Format Document" or creating a save hook running that function.
I have to ask: Did you just quit Vim the editor or also Vim the keybindings?
Because I can totally see not using the editor, but the keybindings, even the basic ones every emulation plugin manages to do well, are such a big win it's hard for me to believe I'd ever give those up.
Also, at least from my perspective, VSCode and Neovim are eye-to-eye, in the sense that both get most of their magic from interfacing with Language Servers, which both do very well. Though even the more approachable Neovim still seems to have a fetish for configuration/a hatred against sane defaults.
I spent hours using emacs as well, and then moved to VSCode. Everything's just so much faster in VSCode because 1) there are more plugins and 2) I can test and quickly learn plugins.
I don't disagree, but I think a followup question would be "how configurable do you really need your text editor to be?"
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for tinkering with stuff and customizing to oblivion, it's fun and cool, but realistically how much better of a JS engineer are you going to be if you've customized the hell out of Emacs? Maybe a bit more, I'll concede that, but fundamentally I don't think it's going to be categorical.
But you know what? I moved to VS Code a few years ago and my productivity only increased. Everything is more intuitive and discoverable. Everything just works with no tweaking. All the convoluted macros and text manips I painstakingly crafted and memorized in vim are achievable in a few clicks in Code.
Spending 20+ hours learning emacs or vim is quite literally a waste, it's time we all admit it.
(I still think one should learn the basic cursor keys and how to save/quit in vi because sooner or later you'll have to edit something on a remote server with only vi. But learning emacs is still completely useless, though.)