(This is a very important question that is breaking my brain. Please answer and repost to share so others can too.)
If you use #Emacs, do you use a Vi emulator mode (like Evil)?
Thank you so much for everyone participating in this poll!
The internet (primarily prominent YouTubers) made it seem like a lot more people used a Vi emulator mode for “extremely efficient text editing.” And I couldn’t believe it.
I still cannot believe that a third of you use a Vi-style interface to Emacs, given the (or my perceived) ferocity of the religious wars. But maybe I’m just holding onto some silliness from childhood and should be more open-minded.
@harish I use evil because I spent multiple decades using vi/vile/vim bindings. My fingers know it too well. I'd probably be happier with the original emacs keybindings, at least in emacs, it's less impedance mismatch with the keybindings of various modes, but it's the path I took to emacs, so I have continued with it. I think a lot of other people are are in the same boat, it's not so much that it's superior or not, but it's easier to get on with it.
@ambihelical I have the opposite experience, so fail to truly grasp any claims about the efficiency of Vi.
@harish Hmmm, I guess I don't understand why you care really. I sometimes run rings around other engineers, but it's not because of keybindings. Sometimes its about emacs functionality independent of keybindings. Usually it's other stuff though, not related to emacs. Whether or not I may be using the most efficient editing method isn't really relevant. It's like optimizing a function that only executes 1% of the time. Doubling it's speed isn't worth the time working on it.
@ambihelical I don’t care beyond this feeling (incepted by YouTube in particular) that Vi-bindings are a much more efficient (and safe, in the sense of carpal tunnel) way of editing text.