> I am a long time Smalltalker. Smalltalk environments are actually the closest thing to Emacs. Imagine Pharo, but running on Lisp instead of Smalltalk and defaulting to a tiled WM: that's Emacs in a nutshell. If that sounds enticing to you, go for it.
> If I were to learn Vim first, am I going to have to unlearn or relearn much > should I at a later date move to Kakoune? Nah, there are only about 10% of keybindings that change between Vim and kakoune. The reason I think it's best to start with Vim is because if you accidentally activate multiple selections in kakoune it may mess with your code and that may be pretty frustrating for someone not used to modal editors. > That's a grossly incorrect generalization. [Nah, it's a pretty known fact.](https://www.startpage.com/do/dsearch?query=emacs%20slow) I suspect that people that insist that Emacs is just as fast as Vim at editing text don't actually know what is like to be proficient at Vim. If you compare it to obamanations like Eclipse or Electron-based editors, sure, Emacs is pretty fast. But when it comes to non-trivial editing commands, there is always a slight lag which breaks the "flow". Even if it's an hiccup of just half a second, that's still too much for people who're used to Vim. When I tried to switch to Emacs a few years ago, I tried everything to make it as responsive as Vim. I remember I even used custom settings for the GC, but it was all for nothing: every once in a while it would hang for a few split seconds. To some people that may be an acceptable trade-off for having a fully scriptable editor in Lisp. To me, it's not. @cblake, you're right, start-up time is similar, but that's not the point. All the people I know who use Emacs launch it once in the morning and close it when they go to sleep. The problem is that in order to leverage its potential, you need to write (or download) pretty complex plugins, which are all written in Lisp, for better and for worse. You can do some pretty amazing things with it, but there is no getting around the fact that Lisp is slow.
