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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
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
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.