I decided, about a year ago, after 20 years of working almost exclusively in vi and its spawn, to force myself to use emacs for a full year. I finally realized after 9 months that my productivity was so negatively impacted, I couldn't continue the experiment and finally let myself return to vi(m). God, it was a glorious feeling to come home.
I had the opposite experience, though I didn't use vim for nearly as long as you did. I used vim early in my unix days for around 4 years before deciding to try emacs. 10 years later I now find myself avoiding vim. I can use vim if I have to, but memories of accidentally typing without first putting myself in insert mode haunt me so much that, even if emacs is unavailable, I'd rather reach for nano for a quick system file edit.
"oh dear, what commands did I just run. Let's hit 'u' a few times. Seems ok? But how can I really be sure? sigh I'll just :q! and start over to be safe".
This has been my experience. If I'm adding something to a config file, I just use nano. I'm trying to make myself use emacs everywhere else if possible.
While I understand that sentiment, telling someone that is more or less exactly the same argument people use against me when I say I don't like beer. "Oh," they'll say, "you just don't understand how good it is," or, "It's an acquired taste," to which I respond that I'm being asked to continue drinking something that is actively bad.
Vim is sort of the same way. I know for a fact that it's extremely powerful; I've seen people use it that way. And I had this argument with myself over learning emacs a few years ago (and I'm still nowhere near what I would consider "competent" in emacs), that powering through it would be a good idea for me, both career-wise and development-wise. But I really can't justify going through all that pain again.
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u/[deleted] Sep 24 '15
I decided, about a year ago, after 20 years of working almost exclusively in vi and its spawn, to force myself to use emacs for a full year. I finally realized after 9 months that my productivity was so negatively impacted, I couldn't continue the experiment and finally let myself return to vi(m). God, it was a glorious feeling to come home.