Differences between Emacs and Vim

 

Without getting into a religious argument about why one is better than the other, what are the practical differences between Emacs and Vim? I'm looking to learn one or the other, but I realize the learning curve for each is high and I can't decide. I have never used an editor of this type (I've always used IDEs), so anything that helps a newbie is a plus.

Before a flame war starts: I'm not asking which is better, I'm asking the differences between the two. I would like an objective comparison.

(the text below is my opinion, it should not be taken as fact or an insult)

With Emacs you are expected to have it open 24/7 and live inside the program, almost everything you do can be done from there. You write your own extensions, use it for note-taking, organization, games, programming, shell access, file access, listening to music, web browsing. It takes weeks and weeks till you will be happy with it and then you will learn new stuff all the time. You will be annoyed when you don't have access to it and constantly change your config. You won't be able to use other peoples emacs versions easily and it won't just be installed. It uses Lisp, which is great. You can make it into anything you want it to be. (anything, at all)

With Vim, it's almost always pre-installed. It's fast. You open up a file do a quick edit and then quit. You can work with the basic setup if you are on someone else's machine. It's not quite so editable, but it's still far better than most text editors. It recognizes that most of the time you are reading/editing not typing and makes that portion faster. You don't suffer from emacs pinkie. It's not so infuriating. It's easier to learn.

Even though I use Emacs all day every day (and love it) unless you intend to spend a lot of time in the program you choose I would pick vim

Vim is not a shell. And it does not communicate well with subprocesses. This is nearly by design, whereas in Emacs, these elements are included by design. This means that some stuff, like embedding a debugger or an interpreter (yielding a sort of IDE), is difficult in Vim.

Also, Emacs shortcuts are mainly accessed through modifiers, and obviously the Vim interface is famously modal, giving access to an absurd amount of direct keys for manipulation.

Emacs used to be the only editor of the two that was programmable, and while Vim has a lot of weird levels to its programmability, with the addition of Python and Ruby bindings (and more, I forget), Vim is also programmable in most ways you'd care for.

I use Vim, and I'm fairly happy with it.

Vim:

  • better as a simple editor (fewer keys required for simple tasks)
  • more active scripting community - internal language: vimscript
  • one central repository of scripts, plugins, color schemes, ...
  • also extensible in python, ruby
  • can be made portable (emacs has some problems with that)

    • Emacs:

  • non modal by default (most of today's editors have taken this approach). Though there is evil-mode which emulates vim behavior.
  • more powerful language for extending it (elisp is a full blown language, and in emacs you can practically redefine everything; while in vim you cannot redefine build in functions of the editor. On the downside, vimscript is relatively similar to today's dynamic languages while elisp doesn't resemble pretty much anything)
  • more extendible
  • excellent support for GNU tools (the bunch of them)

    • Personally, I prefer vim - it is small, does what it's supposed to do, and when I wish a full blown IDE I open VS. Emacs's approach of being an editor which wants to be an IDE (or should I say, an OS), but is not quite, is IMHO, outdated. In the old days having a email client, ftp client, tetris, ... whatnot in one package (emacs) made some sense ... nowadays, it doesn't anymore.

    Both are however a topic of religious discussions among the programmer and superuser community users, and in that respect, both are excellent for starting flame wars if put in contact (in the same sentence / question).

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