My thoughts on emacs vs vim so far

I started using emacs a little bit back to write my gemlog posts and general prose. I dabbled in using it for code, too, but ultimately went back to vim for that. I haven't done a ton of prose writing since then, so this isn't founded on a ton of experience.

At first, the emacs workflow centered around using control didn't really speak to me. Control and Alt are awkward buttons to press on a standard keyboard, and I was missing a few functions that I used often in vim. This reached a point that I installed evil-mode to use Vi bindings. But I've uninstalled it now.

I find the default emacs control scheme more enjoyable for typing prose than vim, even though I prefer vim for code. The reason has to do with what I'm doing primarily - when I code, I end up doing just as much moving lines and blocks around and fixing little syntax errors as I do writing new lines; for that workflow, having a separate command mode feels like it makes a lot of sense. The workflow almost seems to prioritize those tasks: it's easy to drop out of normal mode to change a word or two, then escape back into normal mode and continue moving lines around.

With emacs, though, and with writing these posts, I'm not block editing so much. I'm mostly spitting lots of text out at once, and occasionally moving the cursor to delete a word or reword a phrase. For that workflow, having an insert-first modality that you escape out of temporarily with a control or alt command feels a bit better to me. It feels less like I'm mentally switching contexts, and I stay in a mindset of putting down text as opposed to moving it around and editing.

Maybe if I get better at using emacs' block editing features, I'll prefer it to vim overall? or maybe I just turn into one of those blasphemers who uses both.