As promised, Mike Zamansky has published his thoughts on the Emacs vs. Vi controversy in a another video in his Using Emacs Series. Unlike Zamansky, I was a long time user of Vi/Vim before I moved to Emacs so I’m intimately familiar with both editors on a muscle memory level. Zamansky is absolutely right that neither is objectively better than the other; they both have good points and bad points and furthermore what those good and bad points are can vary with every user. As I’ve said before, choosing an editor is like choosing a mate: everyone else should butt out. Zamansky echoes that feeling and says to choose whatever works best for you but to spent some serious time with your candidates to give them a reasonable evaluation.
One of the very best features of Zamansky’s video is that he covers the history of the two editors to show how they evolved and why they are the way that are. He even gives a demo of the Teco editor, which I’ve never seen running before. He also demonstrates Ex and shows how it evolved into Vi. Most of what partisans claim are examples of superior design turn out to be accidents of history.
I hold onto my belief that Emacs and Vi are two different things: that Emacs is an entire development or operating environment and that Vi is an editor that embraces the Unix philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well and that therefore the type of workflow you are looking for should be the deciding factor. I do think that Vi’s composable keybindings are easier to learn any possibly a bit faster but that Emacs has more and better editing features and if you find one it doesn’t have, it’s easy to add it as a first class command at the same level as every other Emacs command.
This is a really excellent video. You probably won’t learn anything new—except possibly what a Teco or Ex session looks like—but the historical background and good sense suggestions make it more than worth watching. The video is 35 minutes, 20 seconds so you’ll need to plan ahead.