Vim VS Emacs! Colemak VS QWERTY! Dear God!

Did I ever tell you the definition of insanity? - Vaas, Far Cry 3

The age-old question. Which is the best text editor?

I sought that out myself. I started as a vim user from around 2018 due to my job. In 2019, I got super deep into vim’s core features and as I discovered more, my programming and editing speed improved. In 2020, due to corona, I was working from home and decided to get into learning more about, and I got into vim scripting. And came to the conclusion that vim script is total garbage. No one in their right mind would use it. I really wanted to do more things, and I was getting blocked because I was unable to extend it.

So, I decided to switch over to Emacs. The only other extensible editor. Man, this was a wild journey. I got introduced to so many new concepts when I explored Emacs. It was so fucking amazing. I never knew of the lisp programming language before configuring Emacs with elisp, and it was an eye-opening experience. Everything was so simple and easy. I really wish modern programming languages will adopt useful things from lisp.

At this time, just before switching over to Emacs I was exploring on increasing my typing speed and I would like to learn how to touch type. I got sick of looking at my keyboard every time I typed, and the hunt and peck method was taking its toll on my eyes. I tried to improve my speed by learning touch typing on QWERTY, but it never worked out. My muscle memory took over, and I always forget to apply what I learnt. I thought it was a good idea to learn a different keyboard layout. I searched and tried Dvorak, workman and finally settled into Colemak. The third most used keyboard layout after QWERTY and Dvorak.

The plan was simple, 5 mins a day, every day. I did it, but it took 6 MONTHS. Yes, that’s how long it took. It was very difficult for my old brain. For kids, this will take about 1-2 months max. But most kids can learn in 15 days, on average.

This is my https://keybr.com profile, and these are my statistics. (I did not test my speed and accuracy in a long time, and pretty sure it’s much better than this.)

As I completed it, I was amazed by what I was able to accomplish. For most humans, in this modern age, muscle memory of typing is one of the most difficult things to change. But I did it. I got a massive sense of accomplishment. However, there was a huge problem that I did not anticipate. I was unable to use vim’s HJKL keys. This was a huge blow to my workflow. HJKL is used everywhere in the Unix world. ranger terminal file manager uses HJKL too.

Now, I took this as an advantage because already I am going to use Emacs anyway, and I didn’t need HJKL any more, so I ignored it for a while. As I got into Emacs, I went deep into elisp programming. It was new and exiting, I was able to extend my editor as much as I wanted, and it took my workflow to the next level. Since I am not using vim, I also have to discard using tmux too. Emacs had better window management and plenty of goodies that help me better than vim and tmux ever did.

I kept using Emacs + Colemak and my productivity improved significantly. Emacs also helped me write my first website with org more and org-mode to HTML publish mechanism. It was super useful. But, there is a big but, of course. It crashed. Crashed a lot. No matter what I did, it crashed on remote servers. Then my config files got so huge that I had to rewrite multiple times. Emacs also got slower and slower with each plugin I added. But vim was superfast, no matter how many plugins I added to it.

Finally, after 1 year of struggling with Emacs, I completely deleted and removed all the configs from my dot files repos and took what I learnt from this experience and went back to vim. Now I am back to vim and tmux combo and added some features that I liked from Emacs.

(This is my last Emacs config before I deleted it.)

My favourite things in Emacs are,

• Kill ring
• use-package
• e shell
• dired
• winner-mode
• compile-mode
• Emacs psycho therapist
• magit
• org-mode
• outline-mode
• which-key
• projectile
• yasnippet
• ivy, counsel, marginalia
• add-hook, hook concept
• (+ 1 2 3) is not '(+ 1 2 3)
• (Walled garden)
• The definition of buffer makes infinitely makes more sense than in vim
• ()
• Parenthesis are beautiful. I repeat, it’s beautiful. Once you get used to it, your brain tunes it out and makes more sense than white space.

The funny thing is that Emacs key bindings can be used system-wide in macOS. Once I realized it, my life was so much better in macOS now.

My setup is a total Frankenstein monster now, it’s totally insane.

• vim + tmux for programming
• Colemak for typing
• but I can’t use hjkl as a vim user
• using Emacs bindings everywhere else
• I use arrow keys
• dafuq is this shit

It is amazing how my mind adapted all these concepts. If I like, I can still type in QWERTY by looking at the keyboard. Until now, I typed in Colemak. Now I am typing in QWERTY at almost the same speed as Colemak but with a bit more typing errors.

This is what I learnt from this whole experience.

• Basic text editing is more than enough.
• If you want to type and edit faster, find ways not to write code.
• Elevate your programming skills to the point where you don’t need to code, find ways to avoid it
• By doing this, you will realize that, you don’t need to write a lot of code to solve a problem that does not exist in the first place. You don’t need to write code for every single problem.

Whatever tickles your pickle bro.

But wait.

Did I ever tell you the definition of insanity? - Vaas, Far Cry 3