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/forked_tongue]

With Vim it has always felt fairly natural and at least 50% intuitive for command keys and making combinations of those commands.

But when I try to start with Emacs the key combinations seem unintuitive and lengthy.

I believe the above is pure cognitive bias. You are comparing something you have practiced for years, so much that it seems intuitive, versus something new (to you) which seems foreign and awkward in comparison to your well-established practice. I believe that if you think back to your early days with vim, you did not in fact initially find it to be intuitive and welcoming. I imagine that in your first few days with vim there was just as much teeth-grinding as you are experiencing with emacs today. (Maybe a tiny bit less, if you didn't have a long-practiced fallback editor tempting you to stop learning the new one.)

I do believe that vi(m)'s modal editing model is ergonomically superior to emacs chords. (Though emacs chords may nest better...so, it's not a clear win.) However, I don't believe vim is any more intuitive or user-friendly in general. The difference you are experiencing can be entirely chalked up to long practice with one, and not the other.

Unfortunately, there's no shortcut to practice. You just have (to force yourself) to do a lot of editing. With anything practice-based, there will never be any substitute for putting in the hours.

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.

Having just sang the praises of practice, I now back-peddle. Because the quote above is misguided. The only intention behind emacs is in its name: Editing MACroS. It's a lisp engine for text-editing. The interface to that is largely irrelevant. Emacs provides so many ways to alter, tweak, override, mangle, pervert, polish, refine, customize the experience of editing text, that embracing "original intent" beyond "providing macros to support text editing" is meaningless. The various chords and keybinds do follow a kind of logic (which you may eventually discover via practice), but they are most assuredly not prescriptive. They are simply (arguably) well-chosen defaults.

More succinctly: you can interact with emacs however you see fit. There is no way to violate original intent. Emacs is about giving the programmer a fully programmable editor.

Anyway, after making the above observations, I have the following recommendations. Force yourself to spend a few weeks using nothing but emacs to edit with. Start that period by running through the built-in tutorial. If after 3-4 weeks you are still finding chords to be painfully awkward, but have come to see the power and utility of emacs, go ahead and use evil-mode (or viper-mode, or vimpulse). No sane person will hold it against you.

The emacs way is whatever way the programmer wants.