I have not used Emacs, but Vim feels incredibly powerful to me. I feel that I can tell it what to do in a very natural way: "change inside parentheses", or "delete from here to the word 'foo'," or "replace 'bar' with 'baz' inside the current set of curly braces."
Most of my time in code is spent moving around, editing and refactoring. Vim fits that: "Normal" mode puts an entire keyboard of commands at my disposal for for moving around and editing - no need to press Control or something to say "watch out, I'm going to issue a command!" Of course I am - that's what I mainly do. If I actually want to type, I go into insert mode.
I have written the beginnings of a book to explain the power of Vim, if you'd like to check it out. I'd love any feedback anyone wants to give.
Comments
I have not used Emacs, but Vim feels incredibly powerful to me. I feel that I can tell it what to do in a very natural way: "change inside parentheses", or "delete from here to the word 'foo'," or "replace 'bar' with 'baz' inside the current set of curly braces."
Most of my time in code is spent moving around, editing and refactoring. Vim fits that: "Normal" mode puts an entire keyboard of commands at my disposal for for moving around and editing - no need to press Control or something to say "watch out, I'm going to issue a command!" Of course I am - that's what I mainly do. If I actually want to type, I go into insert mode.
I have written the beginnings of a book to explain the power of Vim, if you'd like to check it out. I'd love any feedback anyone wants to give.
http://nathanmlong.com/vanquish/