This is faster than moving by several paragraph and then moving by sentences or words within the paragraph. If you want to move your cursor to another position on the screen that's further than a few words or a line away, use a search method such as Avy to get there.įor instance, use your eyes to pick a word you want to move to and then use avy to enter a character or two to get a link for you to follow to that point. No matter whether you use Vim or Emacs bindings, you achieve navigation efficiency by searching a buffer/file/directory. Make sure you use them!Īs for navigation proper (as opposed to operating on semantic units) these strike me as comparable once more. In 5 mins of Lisp hacking, Emacs took the lead in bindings efficiency.īoth Emacs and Vim have macro functions to achieve user-defined complex edits at scale. I now use s-e (super-e) to mimic Vim's das and s-h to mimic dap. So I wrote dead simple functions that mimic Vim's functionality. Of course writing functions and assigning them to key bindings is easy in Emacs. The difference might not be huge, but I do find it slightly awkward that you have to select a paragraph before you delete it in Emacs. In practice, even though Vim takes an extra character, I find the sequence easier to type. I've seen some articles in which users describe this situation as slightly faster for Emacs since you're hitting two characters, modified by Meta, instead of three letters in Vim. In Vim, you can be in the middle of a sentence and issue das to delete the sentence. Otherwise, you'll need to issue the following commands to get to the start of the sentence and delete one sentence forward: M-a M-k. Of course, that's if your cursor is at the beginning of the sentence. Deleting a sentence is M-k as opposed to d). Moving forward a sentence is M-e as opposed to ). I like Emacs' approach to sentences a bit better. In Emacs, that's achieved by pressing M-q vs gq}. I use the fill paragraph functions over and over in both editors. For instance, selecting a whole paragraph is M-h compared to Vim's vap. Maybe not by a lot, but there are some things that a feel a little crisper to me. There are some things that are a bit faster in Emacs. Once you can move and edit by units larger than a single character, the speed at which you can move is comparable. Both keybindings have their own approach to editing based on words, sentences, and paragraphs. To be efficient in either keybindings, you'll need to understand how to operate on text beyond single character movements. TL DR I find navigation and editing efficiency in both paradigms comparable. I currently use Emacs bindings, but I have no problems moving back and forth between the two. I've used Vim bindings for over 10 years, and Emacs bindings for about 2 years. As such, I make heavy use of the editing and navigational features. My articles are in the 5,000 - 8,000 word range. My primary use of Emacs is for writing academic research in the humanities. I think you'll receive plenty of responses making the case for Vim's superiority, so I'll focus on some of Emacs' strengths in my reply. At least, I'm fluent enough to use somewhat obscure bindings such as lowercase and capitalize in both editors without having to think about what I'm doing.
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