My usage of emacs is so vim-like that I’ve tried switching a few times. Vim is definitely faster, and overlays and cursor placement is much simpler and more intuitive. But there were still feature gaps and configuration issues that prevented full adoption.

You may get good bang for your buck out of neovim. With only a very minimal set of plugins, it has replaced all other IDEs for me. (They're also making good progress Sherlocking their core plugins, so the future is bright for those of us who dislike plugins for core functionality.)

can you elaborate? Heavy vim user here, have considered using emacs in vim mode to quell a decades long nagging curiosity. Just need a compelling nudge.

If you haven't used it before, give it a shot. Worst case you waste a few years of your life.

Doom emacs and Spacemacs are both good starter kits to give you an idea of what you could do.

> Worst case you waste a few years of your life.

Yeah, come on. NBD yo.

;-)

I don't know how much this applies to everyone else, but the ability to display images inline is really nice for notetaking. I cannot write properly, so org-mode (a notetaking tool that can export to a variety of formats) with embedded rendered latex equations makes it really easy to take notes and write things up in a plaintext format without needing to export every 30 seconds to view equations. The ability to embed code that can actually run is also very nice.

Check out Doom Emacs if you are looking for a good starting point. The defaults make sense coming from Vim.

+1

I'm a die-hard vimmer. I use vim motions in my editors, my IDEs, my browsers, my WMs, my terminals. I use vim-like navigation system-wide - e.g. for the volume control I switch to "media" mode and press "j/k".

Neovim is great, I use it almost every day. But it just can't replace Emacs. That is the most annoying part of Emacs - there's simply no alternative to it. If you accept it with all its quirks and weirdness and embrace the malleability, stick with it for a while - at some point you may discover some enormous feeling of empowered liberation from years of bullcrap you had to deal with without even realizing.

Here's a comment I posted on /r/emacs couple of weeks ago:

So yes, Neovim is snappier, and so what? I'm genuinely curious, I consider myself a die-hard, hardcore vimmer. Yes, I use Emacs today, but I'm still a vimmer. I sometimes use Neovim too - having vim skills comes handy with pure terminal workflows.

So, honest question - why should it appeal to me - the idea of ditching Emacs and moving to Neovim (or whatever) full-time?

- I have a few thousand notes in my Org-Roam note taking system. My notes can contain anki-cards - my spaced-repetition content is just my notes; my pdf annotations - they are just my notes; my health records - are just my notes; I don't need to use Postman - my API investigations - are just my notes.

- I don't need to use Ansible, Chef or Nix to maintain my dotfiles - they are tangled from an .org file - I just need Emacs to bootstrap the whole system.

- I read Reddit and Hackernews in Emacs.

- I manage my email in Emacs.

- My Telegram is in Emacs.

- I search Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, DuckDuckGo, and more without leaving Emacs.

- I write everything in Emacs (even this very comment), because I have thesaurus, spellchecking, definition and etymology lookup, translation, dictionaries, LLM integration - I can ask AI at the point of typing text (in just about any buffer).

- My AI coding assistant is in Emacs.

- My PR reviews happen in Emacs. Everything git related happens in Emacs. I go through my GitHub notifications in Emacs.

- I watch videos with Emacs - it allows me to control them directly - I can speed up, mute, pause the video, extract transcript - all while taking some notes.

- I do my Jira in Emacs.

- I open and search through Slack threads in Emacs.

- I learn programming languages through exercism.io in Emacs.

- My file manager is in Emacs - I have tried so many different ones - mc, yazi, ranger - nothing beats Dired in customizability and capabilities.

- I access my browser history and even browse and switch tabs of my browser - in Emacs.

- I even OCR text out of screenshots with Emacs.

So now tell me, why should I care that there is something, anything, whatever - snappier, prettier, shinier, more popular? Why should I ever feel FOMO, if it can never do even the small subset of what my current system is capable of doing today?

Whoa. iLemming, I dub thee eLemming -- for Elite. Even among the everything-in-emacs crowd, that is some impressive next level stuff right there.

In the past I've investigated emacs enough to appreciate that asking someone for their emacs config is a mix of Futile + Way Too Personal + Too Much Work (on their part, explaining etc). But do you perhaps have a blog or something somewhere about your setup, so noobs who aspire to that kind of emacsdom could get an idea of what is possible and how you're doing it?

Sane & interesting enough to have been disproven, by Boaz Barak iirc. Maybe not surprising since simulated annealing never achieved the results of gradient descent + backprop.

You might be trying to be too literal.

What makes statistical mechanics so brilliant is that it takes first principle ideas (particle energies + ensemble) to derive macroscopic thermodynamic rules, all of which were originally derived from observation.

What the OP is proposing is a mathematical analysis of SGD + generic deep learning architectures might be able to derive the rules we have empirically derived from experiments in model training.

These drawbacks are all true, but sometimes storing directly to elastic is still the best way forward.

I feel like these are helpful, and I think the calculus oriented visualizations of convex surfaces and gradient descent help a lot as well.

I reluctantly agree. It’s like ebikes — yes it’s great that I don’t have to pedal up hill, but on the other hand the cyclists that did it the hard way deserved the praise and glory for their achievement while weak and distracted ebikers definitely do not.

The version manager approach feels like a giant step backward to me. Manage dependencies with containers.

holding my nose reading this. if scientific progress killed god, it seems unlikely that meaning would emerge from more ramblings of the same kind that gave rise to him in the first place. we have learned to disbelieve in miracles and to be skeptical of novelty, that change is excruciatingly slow and its cause is failure, pain and death. nature and the feelings that nature has given us should be our philosophical guide posts.

i run a basic emacs configuration within docker, so it has all the underlying executables & binaries installed where emacs looks for them. runs exactly the same on linux & macos. https://hub.docker.com/r/wwarner/emacs-native or https://github.com/wwarner/emacs-native-dockerfiles

M-x package-list-packages :)

You joke, but a colleague tried to get me using nvim a few months ago, and after installing all the stuff he recommended, my first impression was that I was running emacs. It was busy, there were extra buffers all over the place, things kept popping up as I typed, and I wasn’t clear on how to get to normal mode. In sure this has as much to do with his config, which I copied without understanding it, as it does with nvim itself, but it felt very unfamiliar.

> and I wasn’t clear on how to get to normal mode.

You need to ditch your heretical friend if he has broken the Holy Commandment of <Esc> to get to Normal mode.

I run emacs in docker to manage these issues https://github.com/wwarner/emacs-native-dockerfiles