This is emacs running inside emacs inside emacs inside emacs.

Emacs vs vim? Why not both?

Edit: removed the top image from this body. This is my first post in this community.

  • bulwark@lemmy.worldEnglish
    19·
    9 hours ago

    You said “I use vim,” and I tremble.

    It’s not “vim.” It’s vi—no, wait, it’s Neovim, technically, because the original vim is a closed-source fork of vim, which is a non-GPL free license, which means it’s not even properly FOSS, which means your entire identity as a “vim user” rests on a legal technicality that most vim users have never read and would stop using if Bram Moolenaar actually enforced it, which he can’t because of the way the vim project split in 2001, but you’d never know that because you peaked at :h i in third-grade sysadmin college.

    Meanwhile, a mere coincidence of shared history lets you claim “modality” as a feature when it’s a limitation inherited from 1976 line-buffered editing constraints on a PDP-11. You haven’t “mastered the modal workflow,” you’ve spent ten years cargo-culting a workflow that existed because there were no multi-key strokes. Ctrl-X Ctrl-S isn’t “hard to learn,” it exists because GNU Emacs was built for a different input model in 1978, and you keep reading the fact that Emacs is a fully extensible Lisp environment where the UI itself is a reconfigurable application as “bloat” because your entire editorial philosophy is “my editor should do one thing or I will file a bug report with the universe.”

    And you say “but vim starts faster,” and I weep. You measure 40ms of saved execve and call it productivity while GNU Emacs sits in daemon mode since boot, already loaded, already aware, waiting for your emacsclient invocation, and you’re stuck in a ssh session on a server you don’t have root on, and of course vim is there, because vi is on every POSIX system, which is exactly the point of POSIX, which is exactly why GNU Emacs added ess, org-mode, treemacs, magit, and a working calendar to the same binary you called “IDE-adjacent bloat” while I was, what, organizing my life?

    You know what? Fine. Use your vim. Save your file. :wq. Walk away clean. I’ll be here, in a major I haven’t switched out of since 1994, with C-x C-f on :w q, because the point was never the file.

    …

    Anyway. It’s GNU Emacs, not “that one editor.”

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      3·
      8 hours ago

      I’ll be here, in a major I haven’t switched out of since 1994, with C-x C-f on :w q, because the point was never the file.

      I don’t think that emacs has a way to serialize the Lisp VM to disk or live-migrate it across machines, but there is desktop-save-mode.

      https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Saving-Emacs-Sessions.html

      You can use the desktop library to save the state of Emacs from one session to another. The saved Emacs desktop configuration includes the buffers, their file names, major modes, buffer positions, window and frame configuration, and some important global variables.

      I’ve never done it, but I suppose that if one migrated an emacs desktop file, it might be restorable on another host. So…technically, upgrading to a new computer would involve closing emacs, but it’d be sorta like hibernating and restoring a Linux system or something.