This is my Emacs Carnival post this month on Mistakes and Misconceptions.

Just in the past year, I realized something surprising: I no longer have vi muscle memory. I was a dedicated vi user for fifteen years before I switched to Emacs, and at some point it just… left. I can still do the basics with some effort, but the more advanced things I used to reach for in vi are simply gone. I now do everything much more easily in Emacs — without thinking about it.

So fixing what little vi usage I have left was easy: on the remote systems I log into, like my NAS, I alias vi and vim to mg, which is a lightweight Emacs clone. It gives me quick "edit and out" capability on the command line. It's a small thing, but it says a lot about where I've landed.

But to understand how I got here, I need to tell you how I first started using vi.

The Misconception I Inherited

My first job in college left me no choice but to use vi. Using anything else on our Solaris workstations was unheard of. We had an Emacs user who started that installed it in his home directory. The next day, when he logged in, it was gone. The sysadmin had a cron job that scanned for Emacs installs and deleted them overnight. The message was clear: Emacs was big, unwieldy, and not worth our time.

That misconception stuck with me longer than it should have.

Those early impressions didn't help. Vi has a steep learning curve, sure, but the basics were approachable — you could at least move around without thinking too hard. Emacs required two-key combinations just to navigate. That seemed like madness.

What Actually Changed My Mind

Years into my next job, I was supporting an application that required juggling a lot of files at once. Vim, at the time, made that genuinely painful. I knew some of the developers I admired online used Emacs heavily, so I decided to give it a real try.

I went cold turkey. No Viper, no Evil mode, no vi emulation layer — just stock Emacs keybindings from day one. Partly for the workflow improvement, partly out of curiosity. I haven't really looked back. That was 25 years ago.

The Misconception I Held About Myself

Here's the thing I didn't expect: I thought keeping some vi fluency was important. That it would always be there as a fallback. Fifteen years of muscle memory doesn't just disappear overnight. It decays slowly from lack of use – and I don't miss it. Not because vi isn't good, but because Emacs has replaced the underlying need. The things that made Emacs look unwieldy at first — the key chords, the weight, the learning curve — turned out to be features, not bugs. The same depth that frustrated me early on is exactly what made vi fade away naturally.

My config looks very different than it did a few years ago, and almost nothing like it did when I started. But that's the point. It grew with me, rather than the other way around.