May I introduce you to the simple life of just using whatever text editor and terminal that comes presintalled on your favoraite distro? It’s ridiculous how far this can get you, I’ve been enjoying gnome text ediotor with gnome terminal.
Fake news. Emacs is the only text editor non-heathens and heathens should be using.
I did this for the past 3 years. At some point I just got curious what all the hype is about, so I installed emacs and slowly started to use it. Now I am at a point, where Im getting comfortable around emacs and actually start to enjoy its features.
Befor I usually used nano, since I mostly edited my text files from within my terminal.
Interview with an Emacs Enthusiast
All time classic.
Im not going crazy just playing around a bit, remapping some keybindings and so on. It is in fact kind of fun.
(I actually just tried jumping to the first line of my comment while writing it using C-a, which is the default keybind for this in emacs. I think its getting worse. Aaaaaaaaghhhhhhhhhh)
Im a neovim user myself, and i swapped my caps and escape keys at the os level. I touch another computer and am WONDERING WHY IM WRITING LIKE THIS xD
Look into Doom Emacs. It’s pretty cool in general, but especially if one is inclined towards Vim’s keybindings (which I recommend learning) and uses Org-mode.
tried jumping to the first line of my comment using C-a
That would work in MacOS (iirc), since most of app shortcuts there are on the cmd keys, and some Emacs/readline bindings work in text fields. Though C-a moves to the first character of the current line, not first line.
I use helix btw
There are dozens of us!
I use kakoune btw
my fedora is bigger and my neckbeard is longer :D
Neovim with Nvchad is what finally made me ditch pretty much all other IDEs. As much as I used to like Jetbrains, they’ve pivoted to vibe coding so hard that I can’t justify using their IDEs.
I like neovim for personal projects in Rust, Lua and JS but for collaborative work in Java it’s not really usable for me. Database access, merging big PRs, unit testing tools, debugging, integrations with Spring… I always saw too many feature gaps to even try.
Use micro after everyone makes fun of you for using nano
Nano os shit. Micro is fine. Vim is good. Helix is peak.
helix is good, but kakoune is where all the fun happens
I’m coming from kakoune. Language servers are something that’s shockingly hard to get running reliably. Helix has solved this for me
weird. I just use kakoune-lsp, and it works just fine out of the box, spare bit of copypasting from the readme on their github.
I really like that i have to put in no effort for Helix to work, but unfortunately its just too rigid for me.
And it also backs down on kakoune’s philosophy, returning back the necessity of selection mode. It really frustrates me in this aspect. Kakoune’s more heavy reliance on modifier keys seems way more handy and sensible to me. Helix’s way just creates unnecessary complications, and feels like a change for the sake of a change.
Helix pretty much shares the kakoune keymap and interactions, so no idea what you mean. If you mean the line select mode using x - you can bind that in the config.
Also, plugin support using scheme is in the works. The dev still only sees it as a draft but it’s pretty usable already
no, what i mean is that they moved a whole list of motions into selection/extension mode. You can’t just press
shift+worshift+alt+i, you need to think “do i want to jump to the next selector, or do i want to extend the selection to it?”, press or not pressv, and only then pressw,alt+ior whatever. It’s literally vim2: the electric bogaloo in that aspect, because the user needs to think of a verb first:jumporextendin this case, then select nouns:word,paragraph, etc., then select the verb again, this time the actual operation i want to do to my selection. This practically defeats the whole point of the verb-noun motion reversal that the kakoune dev expressed first, and the helix dev repeated after.I learnt about helix first, so it wasn’t much of an issue, since a) i was just learning the motions, so i wasn’t striving for speed just yet b) i had no point of comparison… Until i tried kakoune. After that the idiocy of that design became apparent, and it can’t stop frustrating me ever since.
P.S. i remember seeing the discussion about helix future plugin support back in 2023, when i just found it. Since it’s still just “in the works”, i’m feeling really skeptical about it, and about whether the plugin infrastructure will grow big enough. Kakoune is much more mature in that aspect
The problem with Emacs is that it sucks but there is nothing better, and you are getting stuck with it forever. Welcome!
One of my year goals is to change from vsc to vim hehe
This is also my goal! …since 2020.
I love vim/nvim but I’ve gotten used to using VIM more as a text editor then an IDE. Writing a script? Taking notes? Maybe even a small program? VIM all the way. Working on a big project that needs an LSP? Either spend the next 20 hours fucking with your VIM config and 20 plugins to get basic functionality… Or just open VSCode and install one plugin
Heres to hoping since NVIM 0.11 with their LSP overhaul I can finnally make the full switch
Since… ¿when? omg I’m thinking to start using it to write my md files for Obsidian just to learn the basics. I mainly work with php or some framework so I guess I just need to find the correct set up for this one?
Emacs is love, emacs is life
Say goodbye to your pinkie
Pro tip: use Evil.
Another pro tip: if on Windows or Linux, remap alt to ctrl and win/menu to alt.
Emacs and (Neo)Vim are a bit too overwhelming for me. I’ve tried Neovim for a relatively long time, but I felt kind of overloaded with the vast amount of features and plugins it has. I’ve tried Emacs a bit, but its complexity always scared me (not to mention it uses its own version of Lisp, a language that is notorious for its ability of creating new language features on the fly, hence even more complexity). I’ve been using Helix, and I couldn’t be happier. I’ve realized that I don’t really care much about editor customization, and that what I was looking for was just a cool modal editor with some useful features (such as file picker, LSP, tree-sitter, multiple cursors, …). The keybinds are also easier to grasp, as fewer of them feel arbitrary compared to Vim. In Vim and Emacs, it feels like you can do everything, while in Helix, it feels more like you can do everything the developers think that might be useful for you. Who knows, maybe I’ll try again Emacs and (Neo)Vim again in the far future, but I don’t feel like it for now.
May I recommend Helix? It’s a modal editor like vim, but has a better out of the box experience, better discoverability for commands, and uses an easier to understand select->command syntax.
Just started using helix a few months ago and I’m in love. The movement took a second to get used to but its super efficient once you get the hang of it. I highly recommend it, especially if you’re doing any kind of programming or sysadmin work and you hate gui ides.
I’ve written in my comment that I’ve been using Helix, but still, thanks for the suggestion.
I keep thinking that as I use vim, I’ll feel the need to learn more commands, but I hardly do anything except:
- q, wq, or q!, quit with or without saving
- i, insert
- set:paste, preserves spacing
- Shift-insert, pastes if shift-ctrl-v doesn’t work
- / , search for a string (iirc, don’t really need it much).
What are your vim GOTOs?
I hope that you use the motion commands at least, because that’s the whole point of the separate modes. If not, you should look them up and add some of them to your workflow little by little.
The most basic ones are
wandbto go a word forward or back;0andto go to the start or end of the line, org0andfor the visual line.fto jump to a particular letter forward.{and}to go to the start/end of the paragraph.Vis useful for selecting whole lines.ctrl-vfor block selection (orctrl-q, depending on your setup).can jump or select to the matching parenthesis or brace. With matchit installed, it also jumps to matching keywords likeendor HTML tags.gccomments out the selection (or uncomments it). Works with motions too, likegcc.For pasting, you should use
pin the normal mode. AlsoPpastes before the cursor. This is useful for moving text around by deleting it with something likedaw, jumping elsewhere, and doingp.And of course, the regex replacement with
:s//is very useful if you have more than a few lines that need approximately the same change.This is all very advanced to me. I use Home and End to go forward and back in the line, but w and b sound good to m (just wish they made more intuitive sense), also p and P.
I should print out a ref sheet.
Vim has a built-in tutorial on the motion commands and such. I don’t remember how it’s invoked, but probably something like
:help tutorial. You’ll get an overview of the commands and see which ones might be useful to you right away. As I mentioned, I recommend getting the hang of them one or a few at a time, so they are incorporated in your toolbox.Speaking of help, it’s generally useful in Vim to use
:help {something}when you want to recall how something works. It has consistent naming for the help pages for various functionality, e.g.:help :sshows the page about the:scommand, and there are pages for every motion command, etc. — I don’t remember the prefixes as it’s been a while since I used Vim proper, but just:helpshould give you an index.Also, if you’re coding in Vim, there are ways to integrate documentation for your language, so that
Kwould show help for the function or whatever under the cursor. Back in the day I’ve had PHP docs plugged into Vim, but it’s been a while, so idk how it’s done now. Iirc there are dumps of docs from the Dash app, which might be available as vimdocs.
If editor-specific binds count, then g-. is my favorite in Zed.
:q no w just q
WARNING: buffer has changed, add ! To quit without saving!
:q!
As a text editor (which is different from an IDE, obviously) just use KWrite or GEDIT (or whatever Gnome uses these days).
If i just want to edit a single file I usually just use nano since it gets used right in the command line and doesnt open a seperate window, but if I want to edit multiple files emacs is very nice, since I dont have to take my hands of the keyboard.
emacs -nw
Honestly, I don’t even code much, and I didn’t at all when I downloaded emacs, but it’s so damn useful that it stays open any time my PC is on. Only time I close it is to make sure that my files stay synced when I leave my laptop on, and do something on my desktop.
