# Friendship ended with emacs, vim is my true friend
*Entered: in vim on x201* |
*Date: 20200104*
So, I switched to emacs for a week. Fell in love with org mode and
thought I had fallen in love with emacs. Nope. I had fallen in love
with org.
Emacs is a huge beast. Starting up emacs -q seems instantaneous and
peppy. Opening any file introduces a pause. Yes, it is likely that
me performing these actions on a Thinkpad x201 from 2010, or on a
Raspberry Pi 3b+ could be the reason, but opening up my main org
file (The Knowledge-Base) takes up to 9 seconds. This file contains
four different vimwikis from different machines and different time
periods, and contains a couple thousand lines. It opens in vim
instantly.
I found myself using vim all the time, due to speed (even over
emacsclient) and not wanting to open my org file because of the wait.
So I started looking at vim plugins that could duplicate emacs' org
mode. As it turns out [vim-orgmode][1] does a great job at doing just
that. It is peppy, the keybindings are the same as my emacs setup,
and I am loving opening my files again.
The other reason for me to stick with vim is my LaTeX setup. I do
not have an office suite on my laptop. I use LaTeX and groff for
documents, and sc-im for spreadsheet. I typically save spreadsheets
as CSV files to easily sed them into other useful file formats. For
example, I have gnu direvent(1) monitoring changes to my job hunt
spreadsheet, and calling a conversion script that changes it to org
mode and saves it to my org directory which is in ~/Dropbox. This
directory is also accessed by my phone via an app named [Orgzly][2]
which is org mode for android. Back to LaTeX, I have vim scripts to
generate LaTeX boilerplate, and use LaTeX live preview with zathura
to generate nice looking PDF documents. Yes, you can do the same
thing in emacs, but, I already have a great system that gives me what
I need and it seems wasteful to redo all that work.
At the end of the day, vim just feels like home. I have used it since
1998, and it does what I expect. Switching to emacs has benefited
me in respects to org mode and that discovery is truly great. I am
sure that I am far from alone in this, thus the mere existence of the
vim-orgmode plugin.
Tip: if installing vim-orgmode presents you with errors, mv your
vimrc somewhere safe and get this one:
```
curl -sSO
https://gist.githubusercontent.com/steshaw/7efb3048a560ffd87843219d164d3b5a/raw/0a7523097f2c166af1bd76e0806664cdbc810cdf/.vimrc
```
It'll install plug and vim-orgmode for you. Then you can merge your
vimrc back into it. Yes, this does indicate that vim plugins are
kludgey. Yes, emacs is objectively superior in this regard. However,
vim is a light-weight, high performance machine that typically Just
Werks™. Now users of ed(1), etc. may chuckle at this, but I will
stick to what works for me.
[1]:
https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode
[2]:
http://www.orgzly.com/help
