[plug] Discerning minds

[Cameron Patrick]

> On Fri, 2005-05-27 at 15:04 +0800, Russell Steicke wrote:

> > Well, I was an emacs user for a long time, then finally got some of
> > the vi/vim commands embedded in my fingertips, and switched to vim.
> > But after a while I missed the programmability of emacs, but still
> > wanted the speed of the short vim commands, so... switched to viper.
> > Viper is vi commands inside emacs, so has the best of both worlds.
> > All the emacs C-x and M-x commands still work, and so do most of the
> > single keystroke vi commands, with the notable exception of vim's v
> > and V, which I have learned to live without.

I'm also rather fond of emacs with viper.  Actually, I think I found
out about viper when you mentioned it earlier on the PLUG list...
Normally I use it in pure Emacs mode but you can toggle vi/emacs with
C-z - so I can rattle off vi colon-commands with hideous regexes
without having to fire up vi ;-)  Most of Emacs's movement keys are
ingrained enough into my brain by now that most things are easier that
way.  (I have a laptop with ghastly arrow keys, so anything which
allows me to navigating without using them is a godsend.)  Note that
most of the fun stuff you can do with vim's visual mode you can do
with emacs's rectangle editing options and buffer narrowing, although
generally I find that vim's bindings are more efficient.

I find Emacs much easier to use when I have a whole bunch of files
open, and its auto-indenting seems rather more intelligent than
vim's.

Tim Bowden wrote:

> So if you were forced into a choice of one or the other (vim/emacs)
> which would it be?

*rolls eyes*  That sounds like a troll to me, but I'll bite anyway:

For programming, I'd much rather use emacs.  For short edit jobs when
I don't already have an editor open, or on an underpowered machine,
I'd pick vi(m?).  Probably not vim on older machines - with syntax
highlighting and the other fruit that makes it useful switched on, vim
feels much slower than emacs!

Cameron.