Evil emacs is pervasive, vim users that I pair with are able to use my keybindings. I just have a lot more plugin power at my disposal on top of that.

Update: I guess your complaint is about a plugin ecosystem that doesn't respect vim bindings. I think you'd be impressed by what the evil community has, speaking as a former power vim user whose emacs setup is even better.

My problem with evil is that I'm still inside of Emacs and I still need to know Emacs to be useful with it. If I am keen to become an evil user, what is my path forward? I've watched videos, read "tutorials," I've tried evil, doom, spacemacs, etc. I'm always put off by the thing almost as soon as I punch `$ emacs .` into my terminal. I've got nearly 2 decades of mileage with (neo)vi(m) in my rear view mirror. I am very interested in org-mode and am willing to learn but for the life of me I can't figure out how to.

Fair enough, I haven't seen a great learning path, every question that I asked at first ended in an answer with something in emacs that I didn't know about. What the hell are helm, avy, Ivy etc? I just want to find some files.

I'm on spacemacs which I believe has given me a massive head start on a great setup. If I started from something more lightweight I would have wanted to end up where I am now, but the results on my own would have been worse.

However I admit that even the supposedly beginner friendly spacemacs still has the same problem of "find the intuitively named spacemacs layer, then start googling all the package names mentioned in the docs (which are not intuitively named), and possibly read the source", which is a big set of hurdles.

Appreciate the reply. I guess it's all perception. If I was in my 20s, I'd have the time and desire to dig into it and figure it out. Alas, I'm in my 40s and between work and family I just don't have the time for those things. Maybe when my kids are a little older...

Almost every modern editor has some form of vim emulator, so you can have the best of both worlds

These don’t work for me because I made a slip and added too much vim-specifics to my editing/workflow habits. Vim emulators only work for those who have 3-5 years of non-active exploration experience. Once you commit to plugins, buffer/window-related actions, scripts, hooks, heavy vimfiles setup, etc, the way back is as hard.

Edit: please don’t downvote the parent commenter, it’s a non-obvious knowledge and it doesn’t apply to everyone.

Yeah okay, I understand emulation is a subset, but surely a modern IDE takes care of most of the productivity gains you get from customization and adds a few more, like the context/AST-aware refactoring you find in Jetbrains IDEs

Edit: I spent a long time trying to make Vim more IDE-like, but found it was more productive to make my various IDEs more Vim-like, but I concede that might not be suitable for everyone

Just so we don't compare apples and oranges: The refactoring tooling in jetbrains products is unique. I haven't seen vscode or any other ide capable of reproducing this, at least not for dynamic languages.

I wouldn't use this as the basis of an argument for superiority of IDEs in general over vim.

And of course there are tradeoffs, rubymine users I worked with always complained about startup times and heavy indexing. (This was a few years back, maybe it's improved since)

I use VIm in vscode quite a lot, and I do reach for macros to refactor code a lot more than when I switch to a JetBrains IDE. But I couldn't see a benefit to using vim outside of vscode for these refactoring operations, so I'd be curious to know whether you do and what you use?

I'm not saying vim emulation has anything to do with refactoring, I'm saying that outside the jetbrains stable there are no refactoring tools worth speaking of, i.e. refactoring is not a variable in which IDEs in general beat vim.

If you can write vim macros to extract method, push up dependencies etc, then you've made vim better than most IDEs.

Yeah, I’m also leaning to just learn the heck out of vscode internals and tune it to my own needs maybe via custom plugins, instead of running behind the train. Sometimes investments just stop returning, and you have to make bold moves want it or not.

After many years of being in your camp, I finally made the switch to VSCode (well, first to Spacemacs, then to VScode).

It's true that there are a lot of things I configured specifically in vim, however, VSCode has a pretty decent vim mode that takes care of a lot of stuff (including a bunch of pretty standard stuff that most people add to vim, like adding vim-surround for example).

In addition, it has a pretty decent way to configure new commands, so most of the other stuff I missed from vim I could actually figure out how to port over to VSCode.

Totally worth it for me - it was a few months of slowly rebuilding habits and porting commands from vim, but now I have a "best of both worlds" setup.

One thing that bothered me a lot when I tried to use vscode (with the best vi bindings I could find) was that the vi bindings only actually worked within specific text areas

if I want to do something like filter things in the problems pane, I need to focus an entirely separate thing with no vi bindings so I'm forced to reach for the mouse to use that or even to just get back to a pane that supports vi bindings.

also ctrl+w closes tabs instead of being a prefix for focusing different panes

I used to have that problem everywhere. But I solved it back then by creating a set of scripts that let me use something like vim mode anywhere on the computer.

Lately I've switched to a programmable keyboard, so my actual arrow keys are int accessible via a special Layer (I hold a thumb key, and that gives me hjkl, as well as various other bindings I've created that act like vim commands).

What are you getting from vscode that you didn't have in spacemacs?

First of all, setup is much easier. If something breaks, I can easily fix it. If I need a new language to be supported, it's usually a click then a 10 second install, and it usually suggests it for me (instead of having to search around).

It starts faster, everything works together better, no weird plugin-compatibility issues (mostly). If I need to find a command, it's easier to lookup in VSCode than Spacemacs (because the menus use a much better GUI, with fonts, highlights, etc).

If I want to switch between files, open a folder as a project, etc, it all works well, and out of the box. With Spacemacs, there isn't a good file-tree pane that I can put on the left - IIRC it comes with something like NERDTree from vim, but it never worked well for me. Partially this is the whole fonts/gui/etc limitations, partly it's because a lot of the shortcuts just don't work that well. Just quickly opening up a folder, seeing what files there are, and being able to rename a file by right-clicking on it and hitting rename is something that I don't do often, but happens once a week, and in Spacemacs, that once a week necessitated either looking it up, or fixing something.

(I was faster at doing these things with vim, in which I had way more time invested, but why I switched from vim to emacs is a similar story in many ways.)

Honestly, overall, VSCode and modern IDEs are just a much smoother, better overall experience in so many small and large ways, that I feel I am much more productive, and have to spend way less time tinkering with my editor. And much as I love to do that, I've been doing it for 10 years, and already have a decent set of knowledge about what I need and want. Getting it practically out of the box with VSCode, and having it work better, is a wonder.

(My biggest block in switching to a different editor in all this time was that I had to have a decent VIM mode, because being able to actually edit text at speed and comfort is more important than all the other features to me. But once I realized that Spacemacs' vim mode was decent, I switched to that, and then I played around with VSCode and realized the vim mode there was decent too. Definitely enough to satisfy 95% of standard text editing use cases, with either plugins or my personal mappings making up the gap.)

Makes sense. From the sounds of things, we went in very different directions because I cannot tolerate mouse use in my workflow (severe RSI that got drastically better when I switched to vim). Switching to something that requires pointing to navigate anywhere or clicking is a hard no.

From the sounds of things you're used to discovery by context clicking and menu items, and emacs' lack of such things does hurt discovery. I find the mnemonic key mappings in spacemacs to be superior to those interactions, but I'll admit: only if you can actually find them, and it does take some time to get used to the conventions.

As a developer though, I am an expert in using my editor, so I'm happy doing e.g. ",tt" to run the test where my cursor is, ",tb" to run all tests in a buffer, etc. because that knowledge pays off hundreds of times a day.

Lastly I'm not sure the distinction "modern IDE" is helpful. Neo/vim and emacs are both under very active development. Useful variables seem to be things like: package ecosystem, UX, aesthetics, responsiveness. All of those can be divided into beginner/expert and IMO emacs wins all of the expert cases, _if you are willing to put lots of time in_. For example I'll take my beautiful full screen spacemacs with the bells and whistles turned on over the looks of my colleagues' VSCode any day.

"Willingness to put the time in" of course exists in a continuum. I know fantastic programmers who gave up on the effort of emacs, and others who tell me that I'm selling myself short by stooping to spacemacs instead of rolling my own. So everyone's MMV.

> Makes sense. From the sounds of things, we went in very different directions because I cannot tolerate mouse use in my workflow

I half agree and half disagree. I also really hate having the mouse involved in my workflow.

> From the sounds of things you're used to discovery by context clicking and menu items, and emacs' lack of such things does hurt discovery.

That's part of it, but not all of it. I don't use context menus much and am also a keyboard-centric user. I rarely use menus for any common tasks.

That said, things that I do once a week, but do need to do, are often easier to do using a mouse (or rather, it's good that a better discovery mechanism exists for them).

> Lastly I'm not sure the distinction "modern IDE" is helpful. Neo/vim and emacs are both under very active development.

That's true, but that's not what most people mean. I think the 'modern' comes in in terms of UX, or at least that's at the root of things - because almost everything can be done with vim/emacs, except for fundamentally changing how they look (different fonts/colors/etc). Or changing the under-the-hood stuff (like running parallel processes).

> For example I'll take my beautiful full screen spacemacs with the bells and whistles turned on over the looks of my colleagues' VSCode any day.

I mean, obviously this is subjective. But GUIs that allow a full range of colors/sizes/etc, and are not limited to only being text buffers, do objectively allow you to do more things. And it's no coincidence that almost all IDEs/editors don't use a single font size everywhere, etc.

> "Willingness to put the time in" of course exists in a continuum. I know fantastic programmers who gave up on the effort of emacs, and others who tell me that I'm selling myself short by stooping to spacemacs instead of rolling my own. So everyone's MMV.

I mean, I used vim for about 8 years, including writing (personal use) plugins and having a very large .vimrc. I then switched to spacemacs, had a bunch of configurations there as well.

So I feel like I've definitely put in a decent amount of time getting "good" at vim (and to a much smaller extent, spacemacs).

Still, putting aside the pure text-manipulation aspects of vim productivity, just launching VSCode and opening a folder gets you way more of the way to productive coding than everything I managed to roll out using a vimrc (and does't break every time I change language/computer).

Do Sublime and VSCode have anything like vim's macro system?

Yes. VSCode at least (haven't used Sublime in a few years) has a vim mode, which has great macro support. It's not 100% compatible with vim but it's pretty good.

Thanks but I'd meant in terms of having their own macro systems. Using vim macros from VSCode still requies you to 'get into vim', after all.