Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "Interview with a VIM Enthusiast" video.

  1. IDEs also require you to use their particular build systems. Text editors are more general than that. And editors like Emacs are more general still. Because they don’t assume that your file consists of a sequence of text lines, they can edit binary files. Because they don’t need special commands for moving/editing across line boundaries--newline is just another byte value in the file.
    4
  2. Vi/Vim is the only editor family that has separate commands for inserting before the current position versus inserting after the current position. Because normal editors (including all GUI ones) do their insertion at the current position.
    3
  3. The trick with Emacs is to have it always running, and use emacsclient to tell it to open files for editing. In my ~/.bashrc I have the line alias e='emacsclient -n' Then in any terminal window, I just have to type e «filename» to open that file in my Emacs session.
    2
  4. “killall vim”
    2
  5.  @MrRedstonefreedom  It’s not how GUI editors work--notice the insertion indicator is a thin line that goes between or before/after characters, not on top of them. And it’s not how Emacs works. And Emacs arguably has a more sophisticated command language than any vi/vim derivative.
    2
  6. Does your editor’s extension language understand closures and lexical binding? Emacs’ Elisp does.
    2
  7. Emacs is an editor, not (just) a text editor. I have successfully used it to edit binary files. Because, you see, Emacs doesn’t assume a file is split up into lines. So it doesn’t require special commands for moving/editing across line boundaries versus within a line--it’s all the same.
    2
  8. Quitting Vim is like quitting smoking. It’s so easy, some people have done it hundreds of times.
    1
  9.  @kim-hendrikmerk4163  Which is better? Why not compare some examples? The following is an Elisp command I wrote which, given a two-letter country code like “nz”, converts it to appropriate Unicode to show “🇳🇿”: (defun convert-to-region-codes (beg end) "converts alphabetic characters in the selection to “region indicator symbols”." (interactive "*r") (unless (use-region-p) (ding) (keyboard-quit) ) ; unless (let ( deactivate-mark (intext (delete-and-extract-region beg end)) c ) (dotimes (i (- end beg)) (setq c (elt intext i)) (cond ((and (>= c ?A) (<= c ?Z)) (setq c (+ (- c ?A) #x1F1E6)) ) ((and (>= c ?a) (<= c ?z)) (setq c (+ (- c ?a) #x1F1E6)) ) ) ; cond (insert-char c) ) ; dotimes ) ; let ) ; convert-to-region-codes
    1
  10. systemd lets you write short, concise tasklets that conform to the principle of “do one thing, and do it well”.
    1