Re: An Org-mode clone for Vim

[Herbert Sitz <hsitz@nwlink.com>]

John Hendy <jw.hendy <at> gmail.com> writes:

> 
> 
> Wow! This is pretty neat. You've done some really cool things.
>  

John -- Thanks for the kind words.  I've responded to some of your comments
below to clarify just what my project is and what it isn't.

> 
> I started learning emacs only for org-mode and have never really used vim
>except for editing a few config files when nano is not available. Since I
>started with emacs and it has what I want (org-mode), I can't think of a 
>reason to learn yet another program with it's own set of shortcut 
> oddities :) I can relate to the shortcuts... Sometimes two in a row 
> involving ctrl makes me scratch my head. Though with emacs I'm 
> pretty sure you can literally change anything you want.
> 
> Also, since you're using the export features of org-mode, 
> and as you said you can use vimperator or whatever to 
> emulate vim keystrokes in emacs... is there
> anything really that you can do with the vim version that emacs 
> can't do? I completely understand #5 below -- do it just to 
> do it and it's fun. Other than that, though, aside from some 
> navigation differences and the (#_of_lines) at the
> end of folded headers I was unsure what was to be different. 
> Now you work in vim and just call org-mode to export?
>  

You've got it right.  For someone who is comfortable with Emacs 
and Org-mode there's no reason at all for them to be interested 
in what I'm doing.  The appeal of my project is pretty much 
limited to those people who have a strong preference for using 
Vim rather than Emacs.  Even the people who strongly 
prefer Vim, if they are heavy Org-mode users and depend on a 
wide range of it features and multitude of options, might 
have little use for my project in its current state.


> 2.  Some people are of the opinion that, while Emacs is admittedly 
> a great
> operating system/development environment, it lacks a decent text 
> editor.  ;)
> 
> I've heard this but never understood what was being said.
>  

That comment is mostly an often repeated joke. I think it gets to a 
major difference between Emacs and Vim, which is that Emacs is used 
by many to become the central application they use, with all their
sub-applications implemented in Emacs-lisp.   Vim isn't really used 
that way, partly because it's not as suitable for it, and partly 
because its main author has taken a
stance against that sort of use, in favor of a more Unixey-approach
of merely interacting with outside applications.

> 
> - Navigation. I definitely feel the emacs shortcut pain for certain 
> things. I don't mind exporting. I'm so used to it that 
> do C-x C-s C-c C-e p without blinking to publish to PDF. 
> But, I highly dislike things like C-c C-[n/p] or C-c C-[f/b] for 
> navigating headlines. Your arrow navigation was appealing, 
> perhaps only because I'm not as used to these shortcuts as 
> others. I find myself using two finger scroll, pg[up/dn] and 
> crtl+[right/left arrow] to move around much
> more than the emacs built-in shortcuts. As I said earlier, 
> though, surely they can be changed...  I just haven't.

Yes, I agree that having navigation keys as multi-keypress chord 
combination is sub-optimal.  I'm sure remappings could be done in 
Org, hard thing might be deciding on what key combinations.  
The section-moving commands in Org-mode are already mapped to 
keys similar to the ones I use, don't require multi-keypress
chords even now.

> 
> Great work and very cool project. Thanks for sharing and I 
> really enjoyed the video!
> 

Thanks again,

Herb