What is meant to be the selling point over Emacs? Apart from scheme>elisp?
Arguably 80% of the emacs goodness is the terabytes of elisp written in the last few decades, if you break compatibility with that you need to throw in something pretty compelling.
That is incorrect. In vi and vim, "ESC" is the key that puts you into command mode (from insert mode). Command mode is the full-screen visual mode where you enter commands by a sequence of keypresses.
":" is the key which issues "ex" commands. vi and ex are two different modes of the same editor. Any command which begins with a colon is an ex command, not a vi command, not done in "Command Mode".
Also worth mentioning is Q , which puts you in ex mode, essentially just ":" prompts one after the other until you exit or issue a "vi" command to go (back) to visual mode.
And then there's open mode, but vim doesn't implement that.
That is what people use for the Alt key. I mean, I use Emacs daily, and I (mostly) like it. But the terminology *) is really fucked up inside Emacs.
Almost no one realizes that perhaps since 35 years no keyboard in mass-use had an "Meta" key. And if the "e" people now still keep that weird name, then they aren't similarly frozen in the state of time as the Emacs community.
1) There's more. Lisp still let bleed assembler instructions that no CPU used in the last 40 years, like CDR and CAR. That's if like e.g. JavaScript would have a cmpxchg() function.
also 1) Or it uses "window" in a very different sense.
and also 1) and even when the term is what you expect, they -- in best english tradition! -- can't normalize on one writing. You can e.g. find both "assoc" and "assq" in use.
So if you want an extremely powerful editor construction kit with an extremely weird nomenclature of parts of it, then chose Emacs.
Arguably 80% of the emacs goodness is the terabytes of elisp written in the last few decades, if you break compatibility with that you need to throw in something pretty compelling.
":" is the key which issues "ex" commands. vi and ex are two different modes of the same editor. Any command which begins with a colon is an ex command, not a vi command, not done in "Command Mode".
Also worth mentioning is Q , which puts you in ex mode, essentially just ":" prompts one after the other until you exit or issue a "vi" command to go (back) to visual mode.
And then there's open mode, but vim doesn't implement that.
Almost no one realizes that perhaps since 35 years no keyboard in mass-use had an "Meta" key. And if the "e" people now still keep that weird name, then they aren't similarly frozen in the state of time as the Emacs community.
1) There's more. Lisp still let bleed assembler instructions that no CPU used in the last 40 years, like CDR and CAR. That's if like e.g. JavaScript would have a cmpxchg() function.
also 1) Or it uses "window" in a very different sense.
and also 1) and even when the term is what you expect, they -- in best english tradition! -- can't normalize on one writing. You can e.g. find both "assoc" and "assq" in use.
So if you want an extremely powerful editor construction kit with an extremely weird nomenclature of parts of it, then chose Emacs.