I promise this isn’t gonna be just another Vim user who’s about to talk shit about Emacs, I’m gonna be totally fair in the matter and give my complete honest opinion. So yesterday night I decided that I’m bored enough to finally give Emacs a shot, and that’s exactly what I did I went ahead and followed one of DT’s tutorials about Doom Emacs and got it installed on my main system, the installation process was kinda confusing, for some reason Doom didn’t work as it was supposed to and I ended up finding myself in the vanilla GNU Emacs whenever I run the command emacs or emacsclient. There was something wrong with Doom that the only way I could get into it was using this command doom run, and while that worked fine I didn’t know how to use it as a daemon since that was one of the main points of me wanting to move to Emacs. Once I opened Doom Emacs for the first time I was impressed, it looked so nice and the keybindings were as good as I expected. The font and the icons were broken but that wasn’t a major problem since all I had to do is to configure it to use my favorite nerd font, but little did I know I was about to make my first mistake. I went ahead to $HOME/.config/emacs/ and played with the configuration files there, I didn’t know that I wasn’t supposed to touch those files and ended up breaking Emacs for the first time. Which wasn’t that big of a deal since I just removed the old installation and reinstalled Emacs again and then I noticed the $HOME/.config/doom/ directory, which has three files inside it I was allowed to modify, and just to be fair that was well documented in the Github wiki I was just stupid enough to not read it. After I did I ended up fixing the font and icons and added the Gruvbox color scheme without having to install anything at all and added the Treesitter package with just un-commenting one line, that was a huge plus for Emacs for having a built in package manager which Neovim doesn’t exactly have. Yes I know they’re aren’t that hard to setup and all but still, having something as basic as the package manager is not supposed be something you put effort on to get. I don’t think there is anybody who Neovim instead of Vim and package manger free, and only freaks are still using Packer and Plug at this point so why on earth devs don’t just add lazy as a built in package manager. That’s one of the issues I had with Neovim and I was so glad to hear that Emacs doesn’t have that problem. Moving on to why I didn’t stick to Emacs, I mean obviously I really like it. Well, before we get into that lemme tell why I wanted to move to Emacs in the first place, here are the reasons:

  • I really need a better keybindings system because the one I’m using right now is so random.
  • I feel like I’m using Vim as if it was Emacs anyway, it’s like I’m an Emacs user who just happened to find Vim first. I can’t use Vim without Tmux because I open a lot of tabs and buffers and I don’t like the file tree view.

And these are just the highlights I could think of right now, I just feel like I’m more of an Emacs user for some reason. I really like the Vim motions and all, but all of that can be easily found in the Evil mode. I love customizing stuff but sometimes you need some default settings for things like keybindings, there is just way too many of them and setting them randomly fucks up my workflow because I keep pressing random keys by mistakes simply because I can’t set more than one keybinding at once. It is nice to have freedom in matters like this but it’s better to start with some default settings that can be changed later if found to be not suitable, I mean I use <leader> + n and <leader> + m to split my window vertically and horizontally respectively, yes that’s how bad it is. However, and even though Emacs did in fact gave me exactly what I want I still didn’t get used to it, it takes time to get used to a built in terminal instead of the way I use the terminal right now, I mean yes I use the terminal inside Tmux which if you think about it it ain’t that much of a difference compared to what you would get using Emacs, but it requires some work around to get something like my file manager to show images inside of Emacs. I think there is a file manager for Emacs but… Okay I’ll just stop making excuses, I’m just not ready yet and Emacs takes time I don’t have, I have many other things to do.

Anyways, I think I’m gonna stick to using Vim for now, and give Emacs a fair shot sometime this summer. Other than that I really don’t think I’m gonna master anything but Vim anytime soon. Thank you so much if you made it this far it really means a lot, take good care of yourself my friend. Farewell!

Seth.