Vim versus Emacs
Which is better? I don’t know, because I’m a Vim user, so it’s a moot point for me. But I have not noticed any Emacs-style keyboard shortcuts on websites. To the contrary, it seems like everything is Vim-style — certainly most Google apps are Vim-ish, and even Firefox is Vim-ish (press the / key to start searching for text on the page). Based on this highly scientific criterion, I declare Vim the winner.
I have to concur. VIM FTW
Craig P Jolicoeur
2 Mar 10 at 2:59 pm
LOL! You are asking for trouble with this posting.
Of course VIM is the best editor ;)
At least you know either VI or VIM will be installed on every machine you log onto anywhere (except windows).
Cheers,
Ivan
Ivan Novick
2 Mar 10 at 3:01 pm
You should be careful about conflating “better” and “popular”.
Guillaume Theoret
2 Mar 10 at 3:01 pm
I use pico…. but it’s only cause that’s what I’ve grown up with.
MLBR
2 Mar 10 at 3:18 pm
Bram works for Google.
Scott
2 Mar 10 at 3:34 pm
Also, don’t forget that the most awesome video game ever made (nethack) defaults to using vim-style movement controls.
:D
I agree with your thesis. Vim is win!
Eric Ryan Harrison
2 Mar 10 at 5:00 pm
Its not fair! Nobody knows what the “meta” key is mapped to! ;)
-d
Daniel Howard
2 Mar 10 at 5:37 pm
hehe this will start a bit of a war. I just know vi/vim so that’s what I use. Once I worked at a place where everyone used xemacs & thats how code was merged. I coded in vi, closed the file & merged (cvs) with xemacs. They also made me work on a PC. These days I’m MAC, vim, SVN…. but that xemacs code merge, diff plug-in was cool.
erin
4 Mar 10 at 4:45 pm
This can be started a new war, however you should try to make sure what is more suitable for you. Hint: start with Emacs first- this is form my experience, because I try Vim first so, I really can’t try emacs any more, because the key binding in vim is very convinient
james
18 Mar 10 at 5:36 am
vi(m) is where I spend my days. Used emacs for years as a developer. Switched (painfully at first) to vi as I took on more remote admin tasks. Now it’s all vi. Lean, available anywhere. No more combo-key arthritis.
joe
26 Mar 10 at 1:12 am
most linux and osx apps take emacs shortcuts. who cares if a web browser does – how often are you coding/editing txt in a browser anyway?
mbp_cmplr
10 Jun 10 at 12:50 pm
Baron,
btw did you know bash by default uses emacs style shortcuts? I know it’s not a website but I didn’t realize those were emacs shortcuts until I tried emacs ;)
Aurimas Mikalauskas
27 Jun 10 at 9:56 pm
And did you know that Bash is one of the few shells that doesn’t use vi shortcuts by default? Anyway, ‘set -o vi’ turns on vi key binding in Bash, which is a convenient workaround for this bug ;^}
Scott
28 Jun 10 at 10:20 am
I thought it was readline that was really responsible for the key bindings?
I have to confess that I don’t use -o vi. I had a colleague who set all our servers to that by default at a former job, and it just threw me off balance, I can’t explain why.
Xaprb
28 Jun 10 at 11:19 am
True. Readline is resopnsible. But I find searching command history much more convenient with / than… how is it again in Emacs?
Scott
28 Jun 10 at 7:22 pm
I’ve only used vi/Vim since I started in Unix/Linux. Where I currently work, we have literally hundreds of Solaris and Linux servers, and the only editor on them is vi. I managed to get Vim pushed through as a standard there, and have it installed on some of our development servers. I don’t mind using vi to edit a config file, or perhaps fix a shell script in the middle of the night, but for anything more, I prefer Vim.
Btw, I had never used the ‘set -o vi’ command until I started working here, but now, I can’t live without it!
DoctorPepper
11 Sep 10 at 10:55 pm
I must say, after learning emacs I’m constantly and pleasantly surprized at how many OSX applications support the same cursor movement keybindings. And not just native apps either.
As an example, Taskpaper (as the name suggests, a flat-file to-do task manager). When you press TAB it indents the current project, task or note by one increment. Since copying and pasting (killing and yanking.. har har) a tab character didn’t seem like a good solution, I just tried preceding the TAB key with Ctrl + q … in emacs this would have the same effect: take the next key press literally. Voila!
Although the learning curve for both emacs and vi(vim) is quite high, my compulsive desire to KNOW I’m using the best text editor will drive me to spend a year using vim, just so I can make up my own mind of which I prefer. To this day I have yet to find an objective comparison of the two.
Live and let live…
vim and let emacs.
vorn
23 Sep 10 at 3:52 am