Now, Vim. But I would definitely like to give Emacs another try, just for kicks.
Do you think emacs with evil is the path with least resistance for a long term Vi/Vim user?
I’ve been a daily vim user for the past 10 or so years and used it casually before that. Anytime I tried to use emacs I missed the modal aspects of vim and my wrists didn’t like the focus around ctrl in emacs.
I recently gave spacemacs a try and it’s been my daily editor for the past few months. There is a lot to learn, but spacemacs solves the main pain points I had with off the shelf emacs and I’ve found it to be very productive for me.
Author of post here. I have no agenda to convert anyone, but mapping caps lock to control is a good move when trying emacs IMO. If you love vi(m), more power to you!
Oh, yeah I use that mapping (caps to ctrl), but emacs would still always hurt my wrists! I prefer having visual/insert/normal modes and spacebar for modifiers in spacemacs. It’s the best of both worlds for me.
I think Spacemacs (which is an integrated emacs + evil + a whole lot more) is probably the best upgrade path for a vi/vim user. I even got one of the fellows at the office to upgrade from vim using it!
I went from a fully decked out vimrc to Spacemacs when I got tired of managing a .vim directory. I had things like Unite integrated everywhere and a generic repl experience via tmux so I had an inferior-mode for anything I wanted (sql, python, clojure, javascript, bash, ruby), even on remote machines (since it was just copy something from a register to a tmux pane, which could be ssh logged into a remote machine with a repl). I had autocompletion and doc lookups for the languages I cared about. Life was pretty good, but it was beginning to get tedious.
I decided to try Spacemacs hoping I might find their vim imitation to be 90% of what I was using in vim, such that I could take advantage of the excellent CIDER mode for Clojure development rather than hacking an analogue in vimscript + a user.clj file. I found Spacemacs to cover everything I had been doing in vim, almost universally better out of the box than I had before.
