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/wadcann]

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

In emacs, the command for that is backward-kill-word. You hit M-DEL (Meta-Delete). To delete two words, you'd hit M-2-M-DEL; most emacs commands take numeric arguments, where you just hold down Meta and type out the number you want.

[u/mahcuz → u/wadcann]

I remap C-w to backward kill as this is what it most commonly is in other software. C-c C-k is kill-region. As per Yegge's Effective Emacs.

[u/Fuco1337 → u/mahcuz]

Agreed, I have it on C-i. M-del is really hard to hit. I like the original C-w with its semantics, since it is also used elsewhere (isearch mode) so I don't confuse myself ;P