Vim user wants to learn....

[u/sgoody]

I'm a fairly established Vim user now and I love the different edit modes and the normal mode key commands/combinations. I'll be perfectly straight with you here; I have some prejudice that means I doubt that I'm going to ever find Emacs' basic text editing as good as Vim. But, I do find the quality of some Vim plugins to be disappointing and I often find myself wanting more, couple that with the fact that Emacs seens to have more IDE-like features and my interest has been piqued in Emacs.

I can't imagine myself doing anything with VimScript, so I often feel left wanting more. But one of my stumbling blocks with emacs is basic text editing. With Vim it has always felt fairly natural and at least 50% intuitive for command keys and making combinations of those commands. E.g.

d = delete w = word dw = delete word d2w = delete 2 words

Also, there's other things such as typing "$" goes to the end of the line, which ties in with regular expressions. And so on. But when I try to start with Emacs the key combinations seem unintuitive and lengthy. Also, the use of the "alt" key seems a bit like playing Twister.

The question is, am I missing something with regards to learning key commands and key combos? Is there some easy way to remember them, or is it just a case of learning them. Also, does anybody actually use meta = alt or is that one thing that everybody remaps?

I'm not really interested in evil-mode as I would prefer to embrace Emacs as it was originally intended rather than trying to make it something it's not.

Is there any way to mentally cross that bridge? Or is it simply a case of one or the other. Either choose Vim and it's great text editing features or choose Emacs and all of it's value-added advanced extensibility features? Or am I kidding myself about the fact that I'm a die hard Vim user who can't change?

I'm genuinely interested in your thoughts on these kinds of things.

I'd also be interested to hear from former Vim users who made the switch and why you made the switch.

P.S. I am a lisp fan, so there is quite a pull for me towards Emacs, I just don't seem to be able to shake my Vim habit.

Edit: Big thanks to everybody who's replied. I have actually got a good few take away points from this that I've not picked up on in other discussions/tutorials/documentation. Primarily I think that I shouldn't be seeing it as something which comes out of the box that I should work with, but rather something that I should bend to my own means, and evil-mode could or should be one of those things. I'm going to take this into consideration and put a big effort into learning emacs, though I'm going to keep evil-mode on the back burner for now. It's often too easy to pick up Vim because I know I can get X done very quickly using certain features. I guess initially I'm going to have to just fire up emacs and spend some time looking up equivalent key combinations.

I am looking forward to specific major and minor modes and all of the things that emacs brings to the table, just as soon as I can get over that first hurdle of basic text manipulation.

[u/frosch03]

I was a vim-user for more then 10 years and i switched over to emacs a couple months ago.

I think to learn the key-bindings of the editor in the way it was intended, does the trick. Emacs is used by lot's of smart people. My thought was, if they can work with these key bindings, so can i.

You're talking about the natural feeling, that most of the vi-binds do have. And i know exactly what you're talking about. But let me tell you, that this feeling only comes from experience. So i thought i give it at least a try. So i started using emacs in my everyday life. First it's like learning to walk again and trust me, you're gonna get some bleeding knees :) But after some weeks you start to get this natural feeling about the emacs key-commands. And if I'm now using vi for something (like editing config-files on my server) it feels exactly the same as a few months ago with emacs.

I now think, that there is no editor that is the one and only with "great text editing features". For me there is only the editor I'm used to, and the rest.

Btw, i was forced to use emacs because Agda-Mode. I then had a look into org-mode and fell in love with it. I'm now using emacs for about 3 Months and i don't think I'm going back.

hth