by wilkystyle | 2025-10-13 00:34:03+00:00
For me personally, there's probably too much to put in a comment, but the essence of it is:

- Vim modes are prolific, but they always fall short in some annoying way (Jupyterlab-vim plug-in is so bad it's almost not even worth considering Vim emulation). I inevitably find myself missing the full power of true Neovim, especially with the live find/replace in the buffer, `:cdo`, and things like `:g//norm` (which could be an entire tutorial in itself!)

- Emacs: I have never met another editor (or even piece of software) that is not only so customizable but so designed to be customized. It's really hard to capture it in words, but it's such a comprehensive ecosystem of tools that all are designed to work together incredibly well and designed in such a way that when you make your customizations you can do it in a way that everything still plays really nicely together. For example, I can use Tramp to make my local, fully-customized Emacs edit on a remote filesystem as though my local setup is there, any arbitrary number of SSH hops away, even sudo'd to root on the target machine. I can further leverage the built-in /docker: protocol to edit with my local editor, on that remote machine, as root. Eglot plays nicely so my local editor uses remote LSP servers. dired-mode plays nicely so that I can browse and modify the filesystem on the remote target with my local editor. Because everything is nicely integrated together, pressing M-! to run a shell command while editing a remote buffer will run the shell command on the remote target in the same directory as that remote buffer. Similarly, M-x shell opens a terminal window on the remote target, in the same directory as the remote file I'm editing, as whatever user I have sudo'd to (if applicable). And it does everything with pure SSH, no remote daemon needed. And then there is the customization. Vim/Neovim score very well on the customization front, but I guess the way I would put it is that the difference in philosophy is that Vim/Neovim (and most other customizable software) are applications for which the developers give you a ton of APIs to affect the behavior of an otherwise closed system. With Emacs, by contrast, nearly all of the system is open. There are compiled C functions at the core, but anything in lisp is there for inspecting and modifying in real time while the system is running. And for all the things that are compiled that you cannot affect, there are further paradigms such as the advice system, which allows you to modify built-in behavior by wrapping existing functionality with things like pre- or post- actions (among other things too numerous to get into in a comment). emacs is built with the philosophy that there should never be an area of the software that you don't fully own, control, and have the ability to inspect and understand.

I guess this turned into a classic Emacs-nerd rant about why Emacs is great, but to answer your question the long way:

There's no Vim like (Neo)vim, and if you are an advanced enough (Neo)vim user, everything else falls short in ways that suck.

And there is simply no software I have ever come across like Emacs. It takes a lot of work to make it your own, and I totally get that is not for everyone. But if it is for you, everything else is too limiting.

(maybe to answer your actual question, I've never successfully made the switch. I always come back.)