69 lines
3.4 KiB
Text
69 lines
3.4 KiB
Text
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;;;;;
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title: There is an Evil in your Emacs
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tags: emacs, vim, editors
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date: 2014-07-01 21:44
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format: md
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;;;;;
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When I first started using GNU/Linux I was looking for a proper text
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editor. I only had any experience with Visual Studio on Windows
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because I was a .Net developer at the time, and didn't really have
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much of a choice. One of the main things I wanted was an editor that
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worked in a terminal.
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Naturally I came to Vim and Emacs (as well as Nano, and perhaps some
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others as well). For a few weeks I kept switching between Vim and
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Emacs. I liked Vim's syntax highlighting better, but on the other hand
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I liked Emacs' keybindings/modelessness better as well. I ended up
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going with Emacs mostly because of Vim's moded editing.
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For years the thought of Vim's moded editing gave me nightmares. I
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never really realised the best thing about Vim. Even when a post
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appears on Stack Overflow about grokking Vim. I was already so blinded
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by the idea that Emacs was the superior editor for me that I failed to
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register the information. It took a long time, but eventually I opened
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up to the possibility of such moded editing. By now I was stuck with
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Emacs because I just couldn't give up its customizability or
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extensibility. Also, I've grown to love Lisp, and specifically Emacs
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Lisp, so to go from that to Vimscript wouldn't be quite ideal.
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Eventually I decided I really did want to try it. Thankfully Emacs has
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a package for that: Evil, the Extensible Vi Layer for Emacs. There is
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one other problem, though: I use the Colemak keyboard layout. The
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usual `hjkl` keys are more like `hynu`, with the up key at the bottom
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of the keyboard, down at the top and left and right diagonally from
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eachother. Again Emacs has a package for that, `colemak-evil`. It
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rebinds some of the keys so that Evil will work with the Colemak
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keyboard layout. It is based on that the creator of the Colemak layout
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used to use in Vim. It's a bit aggressive, so I customized it to be a
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little less so, mostly removing rebindigs from the motion and emacs
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state maps.
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The real power is in the composability of the commands. In Emacs you
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have commands like `forward-kill-word`, `forward-kill-sexp` and
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`forward-kill-char`. In Vim you have the `delete` operation, which can
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be combined with, for example, the `forward-word` motion, or the
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`next-line` or `forward-char` motion. I probably have the names wrong,
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but hopefully they convey the meaning of what they do. This is what it
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is all about, or at least from what I've learned to use so far. Of
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course the powerful ed-like editing features called forth through the
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Vim `ex` mode, such as `%s/find/replace`. Lastly, of course, the fact
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that a lot of editing can be done in normal mode helps in preventing
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Emacs-pinky.
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I haven't yet been able to work with the extensible part, but some of
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the modules that exist for evil speak volumes of it.
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If you are interested in increasing your productivity, or you like to
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experiment with new things, you might really want to try it. It may
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not completely be Vim, but it's still completely Emacs. If you use the
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colemak-evil package as well you'll also notice that in the insert
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state all your regular Emacs keys work normally, which is a great
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combination of the two editors. So far I feel that Vim is great for
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editing existing code and text, but Emacs still feels better when
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writing a lot of new code or text.
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