Over at the Emacs subreddit, TheTwelveYearOld asks an interesting question: Would Emacs be more popular than Vim if it used modal editing by default? Experienced users will recognize that there’s an unstated premise buried in the question. The premise is that modality is what separates Emacs from Vim and that that modality is responsible for Vim’s greater popularity. That is, I think, a flawed premise. Vim’s real strength, in my opinion, is not modality but the regularity of its command set.
TheTwelveYearOld’s post has some other misunderstandings but the interesting thing about it is the comments. Most of those comments take issue with the notion that Vim’s popularity is due to its modality. Almost all of them ascribed Vim’s popularity to its ubiquitousness. If you log on to almost any Unix system, Vi(m) will be there so it made a lot of sense for students and beginners to learn it and make it their go to editor.
Most of the comments dispute that either editor enables faster editing than the other. Several commenters noted that both editors use about the same number of keys to do any given task. There were a lot of good, interesting, and informed comments and they’re well worth reading.
For me, the most shocking, or perhaps sad, comment was from ilemming who said,
Until the Emacs development model shifts away from its exclusive focus
on super-smart nerds and starts accommodating regular coders, it is
likely to remain less popular and may struggle to introduce new
game-changing features on a regular basis.
The idea that Emacs is only for the super smart seems to me to be self-revelatory. Emacs is not, of course, a tool restricted to the “super smart” and thinking so says more about the person saying it than it does about Emacs. If you’re a developer and find Emacs, or any other editor for that matter, too hard to master, you should find another line of work.
In any event, the post and the comments are an interesting part of the never ending editor wars.