I am one of those who began coding in Notepad and then quickly moved on to Vim and then to Emacs.

When the whole world of internet services began consolidating around the web and then later when the whole web began consolidating around a few powerful walled gardens, I saw how these trends began chipping away at our anonymity, privacy, web performance and software performance. Computers are ubiquitous but privacy is under attack. Hardware is faster but software is slower. Internet pipes are faster but websites are sluggish.

In all this turbulence I thought at least my software development tools are not affected by these terrible user-hostile trends. Emacs has become faster with faster hardware. While Vim was always fast, I am sure the Vim folks too would agree that they can now run Vim with a lot of plugins thanks to faster hardware. These editors do not do hidden telemetry. They don't add user hostile features. The core editor experience remains more or less the same year after year.

Even after all the disruption (I mean literally, disruption, not in some positive metaphorical way) in the rest of tech world, I have found consolation in my modest code editor, Emacs for me, Vim for some, other editors for other people. My code editor has always served my best interests. It helps me write code and documentation without any distractions. But when I read articles like this about VSCode and its telemetry, it really makes me anxious. Perhaps Emacs or Vim will never be afflicted by issues like this. But still ... If developer tools meant for ordinary software developers like me are going to start sneaking on my data and begin bundling user-hostile features, what hope is there for all other kind of software tools!

ithrow

To emacs with evil? If so, how did it go?

scruple

I struggled to make the change. I think I tried half a dozen times to go from (neo)vim to Emacs and it never stuck. My problem was that I kept reaching for spacemacs and Doom Emacs, etc., right out of the gate, and I would be mystified by Emacs itself and Emacs Lisp as a result.

Two things helped get me into Emacs full-time (and this is after > 15 years of using vim):

1. I went step-by-step through Susam's Emfy Emacs config [0]. That helped me understand some of the basics at a foundational level. I extended that base configuration a little bit and became comfortable with the environment.

2. I then went step-by-step through the entire "Emacs from Scratch" playlist that System Crafters put out [1]. I pushed my personal configuration pretty far with that over the course of 2-3 months.

I eventually moved to Doom Emacs and married in pieces of my own configuration. That's been my daily driver for months now.

[0]: https://github.com/susam/emfy

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEoMzSkcN8oPH1au7H6B7...