Comments on: Vim versus Emacs

By: vorn

vorn — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 07:52:53 +0000

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.

By: DoctorPepper

DoctorPepper — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 02:55:27 +0000

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!

By: Scott

Scott — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 23:22:17 +0000

True. Readline is resopnsible. But I find searching command history much more convenient with / than… how is it again in Emacs?

By: Xaprb

Xaprb — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 15:19:15 +0000

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.

By: Scott

Scott — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 14:20:40 +0000

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 ;^}