And the LLM tried for a bit (mostly things I know), and then concluded:
> And the original commenter never actually explains what Emacs does better. When challenged, they get defensive rather than providing examples. So we're interpreting a provocative claim, not a demonstrated advantage.
I found that very enlightening! Thank you for your suggestion to ask an LLM!
That's exactly why I didn't take your bait. You already know the reasons for my statement; you simply choose to ignore them. That's fine, Neovim is an excellent text editor, perhaps the best modal editor out there. For me, the idea of vim modality, a brilliant, practical, beautiful model, has more value as an abstraction rather than as a concrete implementation. It's a magnificent idea, and ideas do port.
For years, my every single choice of a tool that had anything to do with text composition got paired with vim modality; every IDE, every editor, terminal, browser, WM invariably went with it. It's been years since it stopped being just an instrument of ergonomics, productivity, faster typing - it became my identity. Just like a left-handed person can't contemplate one day becoming different, I have zero practical, emotional or whatever reasons to stop being a vimmer.
Gary Bernhardt (the wat javascript guy) once said, "There's no vim-mode, there's only Vim," meaning that not a single vim emulation has ever gotten to the point of not having glaring, annoying deficiencies. I've used vim-motions in Sublime, Atom, IntelliJ, VSCode, Chrome, Firefox, Brave - not a single extension gets it to the point where it starts feeling natural.
I had to agree with Gary until the day I found Evil-mode in Emacs. It is surprisingly good. It is so good that you forget - it is not a built-in feature of Emacs. And when you understand the sheer amount of effort required to get vim modality right, you just can't remain unimpressed. And Evil-mode is such a small chunk of what Emacs is about; it's not even the tip of the tip of the iceberg. If there were a jet plane that could perform a perfect vertical landing and yet almost never had to use or even advertise that feature, it would still amaze you as a masterpiece of engineering.
That's where you might realize that Emacs isn't a mere text editor, it's a darn text orchestrator - it doesn't only focus on text composition, it also shifts the attention to valuing text consumption. The grand idea behind a Lisp REPL with a built-in text editor is a magnificent abstraction. Anyone who tries to compare Emacs with any other IDE or text editor would miss the point; it's a categorical error to even attempt to do that.
if you're, as you say, coming off of decades of vi muscle memory, i'm sure evil can do the job of not making you relearn anything just fine.
if you've, like me, trained your muscles to relearn quickly, you'll eventually want modal editing that actually works the way emacs works. and evil... is hacks on top of hacks, you pay a severe price for the seemingly seamless integration.
when i wanted to customize evil, i quickly realized that what i wanted wasn't vi in emacs, it was modal editing in emacs. i landed on boon, then used that until codex took over.
I have zero interest in comparing different modal-mode packages for Emacs here - I've used Evil for many years, and whatever tweaking it required, I just went with it; writing Elisp is cheap.
You're (perhaps inadvertently) highlighting my main point - the architecture of Emacs is so flexible that it allows (maybe even encourages) the existence of such variability for modal modes, which would be inconceivable in pretty much any other editor or IDE.
Therefore, it proves my statement once more - Emacs vims better.
cheaper than a model call? you and i have very different conceptions of value. models make it so cheap you can construct a whole editor with the same level of effort you're putting in to maintain your workflow.
and there's pretty much nothing more flexible than that.
Tell me you're trolling. Or you really have no idea what it means in practice to modify a Lisp-based editor on the fly. I can change virtually any aspect of it in the middle of typing this very comment, without missing a beat. Yes, by sending calls to a model. It does it without linting, linking compiling or even saving that code anywhere. I don't have to even restart anything. Like at all. I think you seriously have little clue of what you're talking about right now. Or you're trolling.
i've been doing the same with my ruby editor. once i built hot-reloading, the clanker just does everything.
i learned lisp with htdp, many many years ago, then eventually settled on ruby. it's every bit as powerful. and with my own editor built from the ground-up, i don't have to deal with 50-year old cruft. i consider the lack of homoiconicity a fun challenge to work around.
Cool. Can't wait to see your agentic rewrite of the Linux kernel caused by a misapprehension of systemd or something. In a "powerful" language that even DHH is admittedly not using much anymore and most of us moved away circa 2015. I'm sure this is exactly what Larry Wall meant when he said hubris is one of the three virtues of a programmer.
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50402666 ... hmm explain?
And the LLM tried for a bit (mostly things I know), and then concluded:
> And the original commenter never actually explains what Emacs does better. When challenged, they get defensive rather than providing examples. So we're interpreting a provocative claim, not a demonstrated advantage.
I found that very enlightening! Thank you for your suggestion to ask an LLM!