I’ve been using Vim as my main editor since a few years ago when I got to work under Linux. Recently, I use Sublime Text more and more, but Vim is still the go-to editor, especially on terminal. But I always have the desire to try Emacs, as I’ve heard much about it, and actually I use the basic navigation keys every day.
What I like about Emacs at the first impression is that I can directly input what I’m going to write down and the navigation is simple, just the same way what I use daily. Ctrl-A, Ctrl-E, Ctrl-N, Ctrl-P, etc. Unlike Vim, I don’t need to know what mode I’m in (yes, there are modes in Emacs, in a different way).
And Elisp seems more like a modern programming language than Vim script. I may not need to look up the meaning of the weird syntax because it’s just lisp. I don’t worry about the ability as it’s a mature language for a long time.
It’s heavy. I don’t like it takes several seconds to load .emacs and other packages to edit a small, plain-text file. So later I tried the daemon mode, which starts a “server” in the background, and only a lightware client is needed to edit a file. It seemed acceptable for me at first. But when I edit files in two projects and I want to switch to another buffer, I have to go through a long mixed list to get there. That’s a real pain in ass. Any workaround need extra step which I hate to do when it’s supposed I shouldn’t need to. (Now I think maybe the best way is one instance for a project.)
It’s a bit difficult to get it work as I like. I had to spend quite some time learning how it works to get something to follow my mind. And I cannot work some out still.
Why the hell can’t I manully increase/decrease the indent level. and are supposed to do that, but their work in Emacs is to indent the line according to the syntax table (well, it’s to calculate the correct indent) if it doesn’t. Well, sounded reasonable to me at first, that I should have to do it manually. But sometimes the syntax table is just wrong. Now I can do nothing but use backspace to delete the white space one by one.
There is a feature called auto-save. It generates files named
#<filename>#, just like <filename>~ in Vim. I want to have it in one
unique directory, instead of spreading all around. No, setting
backup-directory-alist doesn’t work, though it claims to.
There are some other small but annoying details.
My left little finger is protesting, even though I’ve mapped Caps Lock to Ctrl.
I think that let me just stick to Vim, just to add more maps to make it easier to navigation in edit mode to make it less frequent to jump between modes.