![]() But you can use Emacs as a mere editor (see “feature bloat” above).Īs an IDE: Both Vim and Emacs have support for a lot of programming languages and other text formats. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is a matter for debate. Emacs is not just an editor: it's also an IDE, a file manager, a terminal emulator, a web browser, a mail client, a news client. This doesn't happen every day, but it does accumulate over the years. Emacs wins spectacularly when you try to do something that the authors just didn't think of. However, Vim is an editor with a macro language Emacs is an editor written in Lisp with some ad-hoc primitives. I don't think there's anything Vim can do significantly more efficiently than Emacs, whereas the converse is true.Ĭustomizability: Both editors are programmable, and there is an extensive body of available packages for both. Home row keys are nice, but they often aren't that much of a win because you have to switch modes. My personal opinion is that Emacs ultimately wins unless you have a typing disability (and even then you can configure Emacs to require only key sequences and not combinations like Ctrl+letter). Proponents of Emacs retort that Emacs has a lot of commands that are not frequently used, so don't warrant a key binding, but are damn convenient when you need them ( obligatory xkcd reference). Proponents of vi(m) argue that you can do pretty much everything without leaving the home row, and that makes you more efficient when you need it most. Productivity: This is an extremely hard topic. If I was to redesign vi(m), I'd definitely keep the modes.Īsymptotic learning curve: Both Vim and Emacs have a lot of features, and you will keep discovering new ones after years of use. It takes a little habit, but after a while it feels very natural. Since I've dispelled a couple of Emacs myths, let me dispel a vi myth: a modal editor is not hard or painful to use. Seriously, I agree that Vim's learning curve starts steep, steeper than any other editor, although this can be lessened by using gvim. Initial learning curve: This varies from person to person. Admittedly this was on a weird platform (Cygwin). Turning the tables, I have observed Vim taking noticeably longer to load than Emacs ( vim -u /dev/null vs. (Since XEmacs 21 or GNU Emacs 23, you can open an Emacs window from a running X instance inside a terminal.) You can also edit remote files from within Emacs, but it does break the flow if you're in an ssh session in a terminal. In some situations you can keep an Emacs running inside Screen. Starting a remote Emacs is (usually) slower than starting a remote Vim. There's one exception, which is when you log in to a remote machine and want to edit a file there. So Emacs's slow startup is mostly a myth. Yes, Emacs is slow to start up, but this is not a big deal: you start Emacs once per session, then connect to the running process with emacsclient. Startup time: Vi(m) proponents complain about Emacs's startup time. Emacs features keep out of the way when you don't use them and the documentation is very well organized. If you don't use it, you don't have to know it's there. In the 21st century, Emacs bloat is just a myth.įeature bloat isn't a problem either. Right now, on my machine, Google Chrome needs about as much RAM per tab as Emacs does for 100 open files, and I won't even mention Firefox. For an ordinary user, this argument is irrelevant: Emacs is easily available for every desktop/server OS, and since it supports remote editing, it's enough to have it on your desktop machine anyway.īloated? Emacs once stood humorously for “Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping”. Still, I'll try to make an objective comparison on a few issues.Īvailable everywhere? If you're a professional system administrator who works with Unix systems, or a power user on embedded devices (routers, smartphones with Busybox, …), you need to know vi (not Vim), because it's available on all Unix systems and most Unix-like systems, whether desktop, server or embedded. I use both, although if I had to choose one, I know which one I would pick.
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