Choosing Emacs

Chris Siebenmann has made up his mind1. He was deliberating whether or not to give up Emacs and switch to Vim. He does a lot of sysadmin work and prefers Vim for that (although I think Tramp would go a long way towards meeting the needs that he thinks Vim resolves). He decided to stay with Emacs for reasons that you can read in his post.

One of those reasons is that he really likes the ease and coverage of the package system and it’s hard to argue with that. Oddly, to my mind, he doesn’t mention Org mode, which just about everyone considers the killer Emacs feature. Still, it’s interesting to see his reasoning for sticking to Emacs.

If you’re currently using both Emacs and Vim regularly and, like me, two separate sets of key bindings makes your head explode, you may enjoy reading his post. As I’ve said before, they’re both really good editors but they meet two different needs. If you want a really fast editor and you want it to be only an editor, Vim is a good choice. If you’re looking for a programming (or work) environment—especially a Lispy one—then Emacs is the editor for you.

Footnotes:

1

Actually, he made it up six months ago but his post has been sitting in my blog queue for that long.

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