Emacs is terrible

It's simply impossible to become as quick in Emacs as one might be in vim. I've been trying, I've really been trying hard to like Emacs, because I want a decent IDE for Lisp. But it's just terrible. The editor is always getting in my way.

I have a new purpose in life. To clone vim in Common Lisp. This isn't reinventing the wheel, because whatever vi-mode they have in Emacs is still corrupted. A new viitor must surface, pure and handsome, with all the Lisp-friendliness of Emacs and all the awesomeness of vi.

I just wanted to get this off my chest, /prog/.

>>37
One thing I like about Emacs is that the commands are modified in obvious ways. Take C-k, this kills a line (d$ ?). what if I want to kill a sentence? M-k. A sexp? C-M-k. Transposition is similar C-t = transpose letters, M-t is transpose words and C-M-t is transposing sexps. And emacs' modes allow for mode specific nuances without having to relearn a bunch of commands, e.g. C-j (newline-and-indent) does language specific indentation.
These are not great examples of commands you would use on a regular basis, and some are lisp-centric, which is an unfair comparison since emacs is obviously tailored to lisp (uselessly so, for 99% of developers), whereas vim is much more general purpose.

Your example of "obviousness" also makes no sense. Why does M+k kill a sentence but M+t transpose words? This is not symmetric at all. All you know about M versus C is that it's 'bigger'. How do I kill a word or transpose sentences? Killing words and transposing sentences would seem far more useful than any of the commands you mentioned; in particular, the killing n words combination in vi is probably the command I use the most doing any kind of text editing.

That being said:

kill a letter: x
kill a word: dw
kill a line: dd
kill a sentence: v(hx
kill a sexp: v%x
transpose letters: xp
transpose words: dwwP
transpose lines: ddp
transpose sentences: v(hx(p
transpose sexps: v%x%p
newline and indent (and insert mode): o<TAB>

One thing you might notice about these is that none of them are actual individual commands in Vi. They arise naturally by combining much simpler operations of navigation, selection and copy/paste. This isn't possible in Emacs because it's not modal, so every character in the above would require combining with a modifier key. They HAVE to make high-level operations to make it useful, and you have to memorize a huge amount of them, because doing the selection and copy and paste yourself with modifier keys is actually really inefficient.

This is why I find vim to be so much more versatile and useful in text editing of *any* kind, not just programming (though I mainly use it for programming in a variety of languages, and for HTML/CSS.)