
Announcing my free book on Vim - prakash
http://www.swaroopch.com/blog/a-free-book-on-vim/
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kaens
I use emacs, and won't be switching to Vim anytime soon, but I'd like to say
thanks for writing what seems like a really good book and releasing it for
free.

The world needs more of this.

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tdavis
How convenient, considering I am returning to Vim after a very long absence!

Step 1: Start reading online.

Step 2: Buy it because releasing books for free is friendly.

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trominos
Seems great.

Are there any similarly gentle intros to emacs?

~~~
davidw

        M-x help-with-tutorial

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silentbicycle
Which is Emacs keyboard shorthand for, "press Alt-x, let go of Alt, then type
help-with-tutorial and press Enter".

If that doesn't work (depending on what Emacs thinks your Alt key is), you can
also type Control-H, let go of Control, and then type t.

~~~
technoguyrob
..............

........................

I thought David was kidding. Jesus.

~~~
silentbicycle
Not at all. That's the Emacs crash course: How do you move by
charcters/words/lines/sentences/paragraphs/function definitions/..., how do
you open/save files, what does 'C-x M-c butterfly' mean, how do you browse the
main help system, etc. It probably takes about half an hour to go through.

Emacs is largely self-documenting, but since it was written decades (and
several OSs) ago, it's IMHO worth reading through the basics. For one thing,
it tends to use different terminology than most people are familiar with.

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dimitar
Vim seems to add a lot of things you would rather expect from emacs (great
extensibility) and emacs of course has always been able to emulate vi
keybindings.

What are the major differences in functionality between the two?

~~~
silentbicycle
Longer comment about same: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=230990>

Emacs is a Lisp virtual machine, and tends to act more like an integrated
environment, while vi(m) is a text editor with less intrinsic extensibility.

Also, Emacs's default keybindings (both in the main system and virtually every
mode people write for it, out of tradition) tend to use quite a bit of
modifier keys (e.g. you are frequently typing with control held down), which
can be hard on your hands. Vi clearly wins in this regard.

~~~
graywh
The key thing being Vim's "modes". Vim users spend most of their time in
normal mode navigating and doing some editing. Insert mode is for actually
typing characters into the document.

~~~
silentbicycle
Right. Emacs modes are more context-oriented ("I'm editing XML, so give me
navigation commands that natively understand that syntax") while vi modes are
operation-oriented (either inserting/appending or navigating/editing). In the
vi sense, Emacs is always in both modes, so you need to press modifier keys to
categorize actions (and if you're unlucky, you may find yourself gradually
growing crab claws for pinkies).

There's an editor synthesis waiting to happen, but decades of old elisp means
there's a lot of inertia for new editors to overcome.

~~~
graywh
The difference I was trying to point out is that Emacs is always in "insert
mode" in the vi sense. In vi normal mode, many commands don't require modifier
keys.

Vim has syntax-aware navigation, too. And what Emacs calls "modes", Vim calls
syntax/filetype plugins.

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tzury
Just started reading it.

So far great reading.

Thank you very much

~~~
prakash
Swaroop's byte of python book is well liked by beginners.

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andr
Clearly better than Emacs! (j/k)

