Red Meat Friday: Emacs vs. Vi

It’s a slow Friday here at Irreal so today’s offering barely qualifies as red meat but you may find it amusing. Someone posted this link to A Comparitive Study of VI and EMACS from the perspective of novice and regular users. It’s so old it was published as plain text. I expended a modest amount of effort trying to discover its publication date but couldn’t find anything.

What I find hilarious is that the study concludes Emacs is easier for new users than Vi. I’m guessing that that’s because of Vi’s modality. I don’t think it’s hard to achieve reasonable proficiency in either of them but I’d rank Emacs as slightly harder. Emacs partisans can cite this as further proof that it’s the one-true-editor but I doubt it was particularly dispositive even when it was published.

More in line with Irreal’s “let a thousand flowers bloom” philosophy regarding Emacs and Vi we have this post from TheWoodenPrince that speculates maybe Emacs and Vim can live happily ever after. We have, after all, the common enemy of bling infested hot new editors that we, the cognoscenti, know are inferior to both Vim and Emacs.

So there’s your red meat for the week. Enjoy the weekend and come back Monday ready to address the issues that really matter.

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