throwawayish

I'm so grateful for the time it took you to write this down. Thank you so much for your contributions in this conversation! I've greatly enjoyed reading every one of your replies. While I am currently not in the state to make any promises related to sticking to Neovim in the long run. I do think that I'm at least very interested to explore its possibilities. Have a good one! Cheers!

Wow! Excellent and thorough response. Thank you so much for taking your time 😊!

It is very nice being able to see what your action is going to effect before you do it - unlike in vim when you just hope you have hit the right movement keys.

That's awesome! Which does beg the question why the others haven't implemented such functionality (yet)?

And it also pops up a small window for leader keys (like space) which show you what you can do with it making it far more discoverable then vim/neovim without needing to pour though hundreds of pages of manuals to even get a glimpse of what it can do or needing to go back to them to remember something that you dont use very often.

Interesting. If I'm not mistaken, both Spacemacs and Doom Emacs offer similar functionality through the emacs-which-key package. I would think that Neovim should have some plugin that does something similar, but perhaps not.

Just about everyone that I have seen use it over vim have highly praised it and it has quite a few contributors already (700+ on github), which is very impressive compared to vim (about 300), and neovim (more then 1100).

I didn't expect for them to be so many 😜. Hmm..., food for thought; thanks for pointing that out!

And keep in mind that vim has been around so long thanks to a single maintainer, Bram Moolenaar, who passed away this year. Which is not a great sign for vims future for the next 20 years.

I definitely understand that Vim's future is lot less certain compared to two years ago due to the passing of Bram Moolenaar. However, and I might be wrong on this, but I feel as if Vim has reached a critical mass of following such that it'll probably continue to exist in some healthy form regardless.

In general I think you make a excellent case for Helix. I'm actually considering if I should reconsider it (if that makes sense). Uhmm..., but two questions remain:

• I shouldn't expect remote accessing some random server will allow me to use Helix, right? Is there any other way to make this work? Or..., should I just learn both Vim and Helix' Vim + Kakoune amalgamation?
• Vim is literally ubiquitous and plugins that enable its features can be found on almost any 'platform'. It's unrealistic to expect Helix' adoption to be at that rate (yet). However, would you happen to know if at least the likes of VS Code and/or Jetbrains' IDEs support it? And if so, how good their support/implementation is?

I tend to use both, depending on the situation, with a lighter nvim config. Sometimes the 3 second emacs startup time is annoying so I use vim then. I think its fine to try both.

Could you elaborate more upon your workflow? Like, in which situation do you prefer Emacs and when do you prefer Neovim? I get that the lighter option is preferred when you want to perform a quick edit or can't be bothered with startup time. But I want to know it beyond that and -if possible- what led you to favor one over the other in each situation.

Regarding emacs declining popularity, I think that in the long term it could be a problem, since most people don’t want to learn elisp just to configure their editor. Elisp is very powerful in emacs, but its design is very different to other languages, so as emacs contributors get older, it could possibly lead to less and less new contributors.

How do you envision Emacs' future? Would, at some moment in the future, some kind of compatibility layer of sorts be developed that lower the entrance barrier? To my knowledge, Emacs has -contrary to Vim- been more open to community development. So I don't expect something like NeoVim to be developed for Emacs as there's less need for it. But I don't know how much they'd be willing to change Emacs for the sake of making it more attractive for new users.

Idk about the vim distros, but I think Doom Emacs is easier for beginners to get into.

Compared to Spacemacs I assume*. If so, would you mind elaborating?

I appreciate your input. Thank you!

Also, there are too many plugins to serve the same purpose and I found it difficult (compared to neovim) to figure out the difference between them.

Interesting.

Finally, the level of customization was also less granular than what offers neovim.

Very interesting. I'd love to hear more about this. Could you elaborate?

I would add that neovim and emacs both have a steep learning curve but I personaly found the level of support and core and plugins documentation for neovim more accessible, readable, and better organized.

I wouldn't be surprised if this is in part attributable to the fact that Emacs is both an older project and is generally-speaking a bigger and/or more capable piece of software.

I completely share your vision about what an IDE should be doing. I’m old school and adhere to the “do one thing but do it right” philosophy. Also, I hate relying on one tool for several needs because if anything goes wrong it has multiple impacts.

I've often heard Emacs users pose the argument that Emacs as an Elisp interpreter does just one thing. It's just that this single thing allows the myriad of functionality it offers. So in that sense comparing it to a terminal/console seems more apt than comparing it to a text editor. I wonder what you think of that argument.

As a side note, I use neomutt as my email client and you can nicely couple neovim to it to write your emails ;)

Hehe, that's cool! Currently I'm really happy with Thunderbird so I don't expect to move away anytime soon, but I'll keep it in mind.

I use Emacs + spacemacs in VI mode as a base for all my text editing

Do you specifically prefer using Spacemacs as a base over Doom Emacs? Or is the usage of Spacemacs primarily attributable to it coming earlier to the scene?

Furthermore, as you're using it in "VI mode", would it be fair to assume that you've got some experience/history with Neo(Vim) as well? If so, what led you to making the switch from (Neo)Vim to Emacs?

For dev environments I mostly use nix + direnv + direnv-mode.

Very interesting! Relying on Nix rather than Distrobox has been something I've been pondering upon. But besides the fact that I'm still very new to Nix as an ecosystem, I've also got my concerns related to what degree the containers can be sandboxed. Do you happen to have some insights on this?

Hi!

I’ve briefly shared my experience with neo(vim) and emacs here.

Thanks for sharing that! I've just read through it and it was a very interesting read. Would you mind elaborating upon the following statement?

"the lack of uniformity across plugins coding which sometimes created some conflicts"

I think the main factor of choice would be to know if you prefer to build your own perfect tool with just what you need and expand as you go (i.e. neovim) or just have a do-it-all ready tool right out of the box (i.e. emacs).

That is indeed something that concerns me regarding Emacs. Like being able to surf on the internet or using it as a email client isn't quite what I expect out of my IDE 😅. I guess the extensibility should allow 'minimal' installations, but this is something I should read more into. Thanks for pointing that out!

How long did you try using Vi (or any other "mode-switch vietnam-era editors with cult like followings")? Have you experimented with any starter kit/distribution/config (or whatever) to ease you in? What do you use now?

Btw, I agree that stand-alone Vi probably is too far of a departure from modern IDEs. As far as I know, it's not even possible to give it IDE-like functionality apart from a few basic ones. Both Vim and especially Neovim do a better job at bridging the distance. FWIW, Vim only exists like for three decades now, while Neovim's first release happened in 2014; almost 10 years ago.

Ah okay. It has become a lot more clear what you meant. And I agree; implementation for Vi(m) keybindings is ubiquitous while the same can't be said for Emacs'. But, while Vi(m)'s keybindings define a lot of what it is and why people love to use it, the same simply can't be said for Emacs' keybindings. I'm sure there's someone out there that absolutely loves it, but it doesn't come close to how Emacs' modeless nature allows almost limitless extensibility or how 'smart', 'useful' and just plain excellent its org-mode is.

I have used vim/neovim for years and cannot go back to a non-modal editor. But TBH I got sick of its configuration. You need far too many plugins and config to get things into a sane working order to be usable on a day to day bases for any type of development. It takes ages to learn and become as productive as you were before and a lifetime to refine.

Interesting. Though I can definitely see where you're coming from. Uhmm.., have you used any of the Neovim distributions to make maintenance easier?

For the past year or so I have switched to helix and don’t plan on going back to vim/neovim as my main editor ever again.

Both Helix and Lapce have certainly piqued my interest as FOSS alternatives to VS Code. However, both have issues related to how well their current Vi(m) implementation is. As you've touched upon it; Helix' keybindings and 'sentence-structures' are different to those found on Vi(m).

Furthermore, neither of the two have existed long enough to be able to profess any statement regarding their longevity. Like, there's no guarantee that I can keep using either of the two 20 years into the future. While no program is able to 100% guarantee that, undoubtedly, the track records for both Emacs and Vi(m) testify that -if anything- they would be the most likely ones to survive 20 years down the line; like how they've done for the last couple of decades.

I appreciate the input, but I simply don't want to invest in a program whose future is very unclear to me at this point in time.

As a long-time Vi user I would highly recommend giving it a shot for a solid month to see if it clicks for you.

Makes sense. Thanks for the tip!

Emacs is dead near as I can tell.

Am I correct to assume that you think that Emacs is dying? If so, would you be so kind to elaborate on why you think that's the case?

openSUSE's Richard Brown has given multiple talks over the years comparing these three. I'd suggest anyone to look at those for a great rundown on how these universal package managers compare to one another. His most recent talk can be found here; in which he actually does some kind of recap as well.

A couple of assumptions I will be making:

• Your hardware is supported; consider to check driver support over at linux-hardware.org. Honestly, most hardware should be well-supported, unless it has been released very recently or is hardware from known troublemakers (i.e. Nvidia GPUs or Broadcom etc).
• Your 'computer-literacy' is at least (slightly) higher than average.
• You've primarily used Windows in the past.
• You prefer asking others instead of finding it out for yourself; the existence of this post supports that. (It's either that or you like to have a second opinion in all cases; but I would have expected more input from you if that was the case 😅.)
• Your hardware is somewhat modern.
• You will mostly stick to defaults (at least initially).
• You're aware that while hundreds of actively maintained distros exist, most of them are either niche or not worth your time in the first place. If, from the remaining ones, the less impactful derivatives are surgically removed, followed by the removal of newbie-unfriendly distros, then only 10-20 distros would remain; most of which have been named in this thread already. And your needs dictate which one out of these would suit you best.
• You will educate yourself regarding desktop environments like GNOME, KDE Plasma, Cinnamon, Xfce etc. Perhaps you will even boot into a live environment to check them out for yourself; loading a bunch of distros on your USB through Ventoy is excellent for that. This is important as they're arguably the biggest contributor to how you perceive your Linux system. You should also be aware that in almost all cases a second (or heck; even third, fourth etc) desktop environment can be installed on your system and you should be able to switch between them relatively easily. However, in most cases, the one provided on first installation works close to flawless while others that have been tacked on later on are generally less polished.
• You will educate yourself (eventually) regarding universal package managers (read: AppImage, Flatpak, Nix and Snap) and Distrobox as collectively they've (mostly) ridden the Linux ecosystem of problems related to software not being packaged in the native repos. Don't feel the need to indulge into all of them simultaneously from the get-go. But be aware that they exist and that they enable one to install (almost) any package that has been made available to Linux regardless of their chosen distro.

Any distro I should use?

Typically, distros like Arch, Debian, Fedora, Linux Mint, openSUSE, Pop!_OS and Ubuntu (or their derivatives) will be mentioned in these kinds of queries. And it becomes mostly a popularity poll that measures what the community thinks is the preferred distro for beginners. And honestly, I don't blame them as you haven't really given us a lot to work with. My entry to that popularity poll would be Linux Mint. If you prefer to use GNOME or KDE Plasma instead, then consider either Fedora or openSUSE Tumbleweed. Additionally, Pop!_OS should be considered if Nvidia causes problems on all the others.

Feel free to inquire if you so desire!

EDIT: I just noticed how you mentioned to someone that your use case will be primarily gaming. First of all, gaming is somewhat equal on most distros; especially with the likes of Bazzite-Arch and Conty providing excellent environments for gaming regardless of installed distro. Though, these containers do still rely on the hosts kernel, therefore any perceived difference on same hardware but different kernels might be attributed to said kernels. Newer kernels generally come with improved performance; at least for newer hardware*. Though, perhaps more performance could be gained through other means as well. I will spare you the details, however, as this is potentially another rabbit hole within the initial rabbit hole. Therefore, instead, I will name a couple of distros known for being excellent for gaming purposes: Bazzite, Garuda Linux, Nobara Linux, PikaOS and RegataOS. If you want a no-nonsense system, just go for Bazzite; while initial setup might seem slightly more involved, it's by far the most robust system out of these. This does come at the cost of being 'unique' amongst the others, but I believe it's a great fit for your use case.