Vim Anti-Patterns
Not trying to start a flame war here, but I in recent few years I am seeing Vim being more popular, and I feel it adoption in terms of younger developers (those who weren&#x27;t programming when original Vi was around) grows. (Ok, please forget about GUI editors, they have their audience, and I am not comparing any of those facts to them) I used Vim for 3 years, and found philosophy and implementation of modal editing amazing. Writing and manipulating code in it went like bread and butter.<p>But then I told myself, hey, why not try Emacs? So I&#x27;ve been using Emacs for ~6months now and cannot but notice that community is much more niche and humble compared to Vim. Just look at the sheer number of color schemes available for both editors. And I had to agree, Vim was far superior text editor, but that wasn&#x27;t enough to keep me away from Emacs, since I gave the advantage to other things (everything else) that Emacs does better.<p>I tried EVIL mode, and it is amazing, but something just felt wrong using it inside Emacs. I wasn&#x27;t using either Emacs or Vim. I would often shuffle and mix commands, sometimes I would do :w, sometimes C-x C-s. So I decided to ditch Evil until I get more comfortable with Emacs key bindings. I came to Emacs because of Lisp (and general FP audience is much, much, more based around Emacs, makes sense), amazing tools and plugins which I found more stable, better designed, and it is weird to say this but things just worked with Emacs, things like auto-completion and code navigation (ivy, ace-jump-mode) were really fast, hustle free experiences. Disclaimer, I have never touched older versions of Emacs, spent my time in 24, and now in 25, so many of <i>myths</i> and problems that Emacs got known for over the time, I think, aren&#x27;t there anymore.<p>And to sum things up, what is really weird to me is that functional programming is on the rise and every year I see it more and more being adopted, but that doesn&#x27;t help Emacs audience grow. (Maybe because I am young, and I am nerd often found in nerd communities where things like FP are often praised, but in the real world considered a bit awkward or esoteric.) I showed up at the FP workshop few weeks before in local dev&#x2F;hacker community place, everybody rocking Sublime Text&#x2F;Vim, but nobody used Emacs, people were looking at me like I was an Alien. Spacemacs is doing good job at attracting people, but maybe Emacs will stay that programmers&#x2F;nerd phenomenon, the all-mighty lisp OS, that in the end people often reject or overlook. And why is it like so? I do not know. If somebody can sink into and learn Vim, I don&#x27;t see a reason why it is different story with Emacs.