HACKER Q&A
📣 drekipus

Do Emacs users feel as stuck without Emacs, as Vim users do with Vim?


I'm sure plenty of vim users know the feeling of writing in text boxes on the web, or in other programs, and finding `:w` and `jk` everywhere, and not having modal operations.

Do emacs users have the same issue? I know a lot of software comes with some keyboard shortcuts that are similar to emacs, but not all of them, and i don't know if there's a similar level of "i am stuck without my editor" feeling that emacs users get when they don't have all the shortcuts available.

  👤 bitwize Accepted Answer ✓
Not a matter of keyboard shortcuts, but I'm quite at sixes and sevens in other editors because I can tell Emacs what I want done and how, live as I edit, in Lisp, and I simply cannot do that in Sublime Text or Visual Studio Code.

For me, web forms are okay for up to a typical Hackernews comment's worth of text. More than that and it gets irritating.

👤 __d
Being non-model, Emacs users probably have less dissonance when using text boxes, etc.

And part of the appeal of macOS for me is that the UI toolkit uses an Emacs-compatible set of shortcuts. So it's generally not a terrible experience, although without the meta key, you don't get a lot.

In day-to-day textbox use, I miss: M-f/M-b/M-d/C-delete (word forward, word back, delete word forward, delete word back), and C-space/C-w/C-y (mark, cut, paste). I usually type them, realize they haven't worked, and shift over to the fallback strategy without too much annoyance.

Strangely C-t (transpose) is the thing I miss most.

👤 bergheim
Sure, but there are things you can do to improve this. Browserplugins and others. See for instance:

https://github.com/zachcurry/emacs-anywhere https://github.com/cknadler/vim-anywhere

👤 necovek
Emacs has allowed making use of OS-shortcuts for basic editing for a while, so I suspect people are not as frustrated as (possibly) vim users.

I still hate to be found in non-Emacs editor for any non-trivial amount of text editing (a few paragraphs), especially if it's some sort of structured text.

Note that there are browser plugins to have textareas filled in with your actual $EDITOR of choice.