Hello,

I am an vim user and I am used to the vim way of doing things. I started tinkering with emacs some time ago and enjoying it since because of the elisp. however I find the default keybinding kinda weird and it’s hard to get used to it. we can’t even vi" or ci" in emacs. also emacs doesn’t have inbuilt multi cursor support.

I really want to use emacs but these things are holding me back :(

  • ByterEnglish
    6·
    5 months ago

    I came into Emacs (only a year ago) with Vim experience as well, and it was a difficult transition for the reasons you describe, but I persisted due to the beauty and power of the rest of Emacs’ design and ecosystem.

    I try to use the default bindings whenever possible, as I find going against the grain in Emacs leads to less efficiencies as packages stop cooperating with me or each other. Evil-mode is often criticized for this reason. It clobbers other bindings.

    Understand that the default editing functions work best for lisps and their sexps. You will likely need to find third party packages to get that fluid feeling back for non-lisps. (Or implement them yourself!)

    Check out

    • change-inner which uses expand-region
    • Maybe even the heavy-handed evil-mode. (But if you do, I’d recommend considering Meow as a less-invasive alternative)
    • wgrep combined with the replace- commands really impressed me.