Thursday, November 28, 2013

vim slow, Lisp, etc.

I am helping a lawyer office in (a difficult) trying Vi(m), and have a few questions. The fact is that Vim seems to be very slow compared to Emacs. Let me elaborate on that.

1 - Lawyers work with long (very long) texts and Latex sources. Basically, an OCR program transforms every thing they are working with into text. Asterisks are added automatically by the OCR, that is written in Lisp (or inLab Scheme). The asterisks control the outline in something lawyers call org-mode. They use tabs and shift tabs to close the outline, and have a fast overview of the document.

It seems that Vim outline did not work as well as Emacs Org-mode. The lawyers complain that it takes forever to close or open the paragraphs. It does not have schedules, calendars, deadlines, etc. Latex sources seems to be much slower in Vim, and often freezes Vim. In fact, I noticed that Vim becomes so slow that people types faster than Vim deals with the syntax coloring. First question: How to make Vim faster?

2- Lawyers often make search by meaning. There are programs, in elisp, that analize the text, and perform a fuzzy search. Second question: How to switch from vimscript to Lisp? Any dialect if Lisp will do. People who wrote the scripts said that they can convert everything to Racket, Common Lisp, etc. I read somewhere that Vim accepts scripting in almost any language: Python, Ruby, and Racket.

3- It seems that there is a Vi clone that does everything these lawyers want. It is fast in dealing with large Latex sources, it has an org-mode that works like emacs, etc. etc. It is called Evil. Third question: What am I loosing if I work with Evil?

Please, I am not a programmer expert. In fact, I know very little about programming, and almost nothing about Vim and other Vi-clones. People says that Vim is better than Emacs, and that everybody uses Vim, etc. Therefore my friends decided to give Vim a chance. Audiatur et altera pars, lawyers say. In the context, it means: If there is a claim that Vim is better than Emacs, you should try Vim, before dismissing the claim. Therefore give examples, and explain how to install everything that need to be installed in order to make Vim faster.

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