So a few weeks ago, I had a wild idea to explore Emacs, after watching this hilarious clip from one of my favorite show Silicon Valley. For a long time, I have been curious what Emacs is, and why so many people claim it’s better than VIM (to be fair, there are also many people who claim Vim is better than Emacs), the only reason I did not try Emacs was just because I liked how easily it gets to move around and edit things in VIM, and I heard that Emacs doesn’t work that way. Luckily, after some research, I found out about Spacemacs, and later on, Doom-Emacs, both of which are built by ex-VIM users and have an Evil Mode, which provides VIM-like editing powers for Emacs. So I decided that it’s time to make that bold movement to Emacs, and, actually, was even looking forward to see how it goes. As I expected that by using Emacs, my productivity level would temporarily decrease, I made a promise to myself that no matter what happens, in at least two weeks, I won’t use any other editors but Emacs (and I did keep that promise).
After the short introduction of VIM, I hope I did persuade you to start using this awesome editor to replace any bloated software you have been using. However, I understand that it can be difficult to get started, and the vimtutor might not work for everyone.
Back when I first started using VIM, I was in the same position, and the only thing that kept me from giving up on it was simply because I couldn’t run VSCode or Atom on the remote super computer at work. Long after that, I realized that there is a simple secret that, if I had known from that beginning, would have dramatically eased the path into VIM. That secret is indeed very important, but for some reason, vimtutor seems to expect us to figure it out on our own. The secret is:
In this blog, so far I have talked about minimal software, about command line interface, and most importantly, about how not using your mouse is good for productivity. cased those “principles” that (I hope) we’ve come to an agree, now is the time to discuss something more practical, starting with: what text editor we should use? In this post, I want to introduce to you a little bit about one of the best options you can go with: VIM.