The comments to my recent post Emacs And Modal Editing veered off to a discussion of why it’s not really possible to compare Emacs and Vim. Ag ibragimov expressed a point of view that I’ve long held: Emacs and Vim are really two different type of applications so it makes no sense to compare them.
I have always said that whether you embrace Vim or Emacs is a matter of your world view regarding editors. If you are looking for a fast, relatively light weight editor that excels in editing text and doesn’t bother with anything else, Vim is the correct choice. If you are looking for a Lisp Machine-like operating environment that serves as the center of your computing workflow, then you should choose Emacs. They’re both really good editors and which is right for you depends on that worldview.
All this was in the context of the editor wars, one of our oldest and most cherished holy wars. As I’ve said many times before, the editor wars can be funny and are often a source of entertainment but you shouldn’t take them seriously. These days, I doubt anyone does.
That brings us to this post by Odd-Distribution2887 from the Emacs subreddit. His worldview, I submit, is clearly that of the Vim user and he would probably be happier there. He appears to think that he should want to use Emacs but why should he? He should use whatever editor is in most accord with his workflow and disposition.
That’s not to say it’s a lifetime commitment. You can, and lots of folks do, change their mind and switch from one to the other. I spent at least 25 years with Vi(m) before I changed to Emacs. If you’re interested, you can read my two part series on why I changed here and here.
The takeaway from this post is that neither Vim nor Emacs is “better”. It’s simply a matter of what you’re looking for in an editor.