One of our longest standing holy wars is Emacs versus Vim. I’ve been around long enough that I’ve seen all the jokes and memes. Seen them over and over again, in fact. At this point, I doubt anyone is even serious about the debate; they just throw out the same old arguments for the fun of the troll. Still, occasionally someone tries to bring a little light to the squabble.
I’ve written before about my thoughts on the war. Vim and Emacs serve two different constituencies and you pick the one that meets what you want from an editor: Vim if you’re looking for a fast editor that does one thing (editing) well; Emacs if you want an operating environment or, as I like to say, a recapitulation of the Lisp Machine.
David Morelo has a nice post that makes an honest assessment of the two editors’ strengths of weaknesses and which you should choose. I pretty much agree with what he has to say. In the past, I would have agreed with his statement that “[f]or pure text editing, Vim is usually faster…” but I’m no longer sure that’s true. Certainly Vim, with it’s composable command set can take less time to invoke an editing operation that is common to both editors but Emacs has a much larger command set and an individual user can, of course, add any command they like. Given that, I’m pretty confident Emacs can be faster for some editing jobs simply because it has a more powerful command set.
Or maybe not. As I said, it doesn’t really matter. If you want an editor that edits your files quickly and easily and the idea of playing Tetris in your editor seems bizarre, then Vim is your editor. If you want a complete operating environment in which you can perform most of your tasks, then Emacs is for you. The real argument is not which editor is better but which workflow is more effective.
In any event, read Morelo’s post and see if you don’t agree with what he has to say.