If you’ve been around Irreal for a while, you know that I don’t usually partake in the Editor Wars except in a humorous way, mostly in Red Meat Friday posts such as this one. Over at Kindness City there’s a post that considers the author’s view and use of Emacs, Vim, and ED. The reason that I’m writing about it is that the author uses all three and his post is about when and why he uses each one.
The author usually fires up Vim when he’s on a foreign host because you can be sure it’s going to be installed. Similarly, he uses ED for scripting editing functions on a foreign host. He particularly likes using Vim and Tmux for remote pair programming. That’s something I can’t relate to because I consider “pair programming” something that happens to particularly evil programmers when they go to Hell but I’m aware that that may be a minority view so if you like such things, be sure to check out the post.
On his local machine, he’s strictly an Emacs user and, in fact, embraces the “everything in Emacs” worldview. As much as I hate mixing editors, this approach makes sense to me—other than the pair programming stuff, of course. I’d first try to use Tramp but if that didn’t work out I’d fire up Vim. My Vim-fu is extremely atrophied but I can still get around in an emergency. I’ve even fallen back to ED when really stuck. Still, I’ve found I’m no longer comfortable wrangling text unless I’m doing it in Emacs.