That's what I don't get: for years, vi (and vim) mocked the emacs community (with some justification) for throwing everything and the kitchen sink into our editor. We were building an entire operating environment, while vi was providing a nice, solid, fast text editor.
But with vim & neovim, people are building a complex operating environment in a terrible language, and ignoring the man-centuries of effort which have gone into emacs.
Why not just switch over? In what ways is a tricked-out vim or neovim preferable to emacs? In what ways is tricking out vim or neovim preferable to emacs?
There's a lot of engineering in Vim as well. E.g., Vim's completion system is actually real cool once you learn it (it "clicked" for me after watching this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TX3kV3TICU ). Vim regex, folding, and spellcheck also have useful features that you won't find anywhere else.
More generally, I agree with you. If it were up to me I would prefer to use Emacs as a baseline. But it's not up to me, just like it wasn't up to Google to decide that Javascript wins. Ubiquity wins. Emacs lost.
> for throwing everything and the kitchen sink into our editor. ... But with vim & neovim, people are building a complex operating environment
That's not really true. The explicit goal of Nvim is to be embedded and focus on "peer to peer" nvim instances. That's the opposite of Emacs' constant reminder that there needs to be a single Emacs daemon controlling everything, and you "should never leave Emacs".
> More generally, I agree with you. If it were up to me I would prefer to use Emacs as a baseline. But it's not up to me, just like it wasn't up to Google to decide that Javascript wins. Ubiquity wins. Emacs lost.
I don't think one can really say 'emacs lost'; the game's not over yet. Yes, emacs really has lost popularity over the last decade, and yes vi really has maintained its popularity. But emacs still exists, new users are still coming to it — and at the end of the day, emacs is a better operating environment than vi. They are both pseudo-Turing-equivalent, in the sense that emacs can perfectly emulate vi & vi can perfectly emulate emacs — but emacs is extensible in a far better language than (vi)|(vim)|(neovim).
I maintain hope that as young programmers become old programmers, they will see the wisdom of true native apps (unlike Sublime), of free software (unlike TextMate) and that when they evaluate emacs vs. vi they will choose an editor they can use & extend for the rest of their lives.
This bothers me too, as a vi / vim user of 20 years, I've always respected emacs even if I didn't want to use it. But now it's getting to be where vim too is laboring under a big pile of hacks, and in a worse language than elisp. Recently I've switched to kakoune for development, which innovated where it counts by implementing new ideas about the core job of editing text. I'll still use plain vi as $EDITOR, because I know it's always there for me, but vim-as-an-ide is not for me.
I have a similar thought coming from a Java/Eclipse background; why use a bunch of half baked plugins to build a poor IDE experience? Vanilla vim is very capable. Personally, I use zero plugins, and a minimal vimrc, and have for years.
I've given emacs 3 tries. First just main emacs, then with Evil mode, and last time as Spacemacs. Every time the issue is the same: there is won't be any significant improvement to justify the re-learning curve of everything.
Imo fuzzy finding and git plugins isn't a huge stretch for a editor. I still wouldn't like to read my email from vim.
I'm using Spacemacs with evil mode only for note taking and work tracking with org-mode. For the rest I'm still using Vim, but the org-mode was for me absolute worth it - now doing it for almost three years. Still for development still using Vi(m), because it's on every (remote) machine, is so much more responsive. Just to say, org-mode alone is worth emacs with evil mode.
But with vim & neovim, people are building a complex operating environment in a terrible language, and ignoring the man-centuries of effort which have gone into emacs.
Why not just switch over? In what ways is a tricked-out vim or neovim preferable to emacs? In what ways is tricking out vim or neovim preferable to emacs?