Well, GNU Emacs 22 just came out like a couple weeks ago. And I posit that one of the things that scares people away from Emacs is that it takes longer to customize to one's liking than Vim. At least, that's the way it is for me. Using Emacs in it's default configuration (or at least, by my recollection, the default configuration of version 21) is terrible. Fortunately, unlike some people, I've never destroyed all the copies of my .emacs file, so I've only had to write my configuration once. But I'm still adding to it probably once a week. Even though Emacs has the nice Customize feature, Vim is more "set it and forget it" (and for a fewer number of options) than Emacs, methinks.

My .emacs file is 33666 bytes, my .vimrc is 4948 bytes.

I used emacs for years until I found myself on a system that didn't have it so I tried the installed alternatives, namely nano, pico and vim. Vim just blew the others away and it is now my editor of choice. It's far less complex than emacs and doesnt try to be too many other things. Just my humble opinion.

It really becomes a nit
 

Many years ago when I first started to look into multi-platform text editors, there were not that many choices. Emacs and Vi ran on multiple platforms, but Emacs ran on more. However, Emacs was a significant resource user. Until the nineties, that was a driving factor.

But around 1995, I bought my first home PC, a 100 MHz Micron P100 PC. I found I could run either Windows or Linux on this box and I found I could get portable versions of Emacs on either one. Performance was fine. Unless I used heavy configurations, start up times were within a few seconds.

At that time, Vi implementations were beginning to spring up on multiple platforms. Within a few years, I could readily get Vi or Emacs (in various flavors, such as Elvis, Vim, Vile, and a few others.

Vim is definitely tighter than Emacs, no question about that. But the deal is this - current systems are plenty capable of dealing with either of them. I distinctly remember using an under-configured Windows 98 desktop at a contract in the late nineties. The box had only 32 MB of memory but was asked to process huge Word documents. It would often choke, even crash. But Emacs and Vi - Vile at the time, worked just fine.

So I come back to the same old thing - use what works and also what you like.

I probably still use GNU Emacs more than anything else, but at work, I have copies of GNU Emacs, Micro Emacs, WinVi on my XP desktop and Vi on my Linux and Sun Solaris UNIX servers.

At home, I also probably use GNU Emacs most, but I frequently use NEdit, Leafpad, and Mousepad, especially when all I am doing is simple copy and paste operations with minimal content editing. For heavy editing, I use GNU Emacs most of the time, but for certain editing that has a pattern to it, Vi fits, so I use some dialect of Vi, often Gvim.

I use them all as tools in a tool chest, no religion about it at all for me.

@masinick: I'm afraid I can't relate your post heading to the argument in your post. Explain?

It all boils down to personal preference
 

Emacs has the capability to emulate Vi keystrokes, and over the past few years, Vim volleyed back and can also emulate the Emacs editing keystrokes.

The differences then boil down to philosophy and preference. Both are great tools and the mere fact that they are so extensible as to emulate many other editors points to that.

Vim is still smaller and tighter, no doubt about that. GNU Emacs is a full blown development environment, complete with its own programming language (Emacs Lisp).

People who prefer one or the other tend to feel strongly about it and that is OK. Either one is quite capable of handling big or small jobs. Both tend to have a learning curve that is larger than other editors and more than basic desktop apps, but both are also more functional than all but the best editors and can stack up to almost anything.

In my opinion, you cannot go wrong with either one of them, and that is why I say it's a nit - if one were to complain about one versus another. The Nano, Pico camp of editors are really simple, but not all that powerful. The gedit, kedit camp of editors are moderately functional and have GUI capabilities, but are not as extensible. Vim has great extensibility, but it is designed strictly for editing. In that sense, it is more focused on editing than Emacs.

In the case of Emacs, its focus is more on the entire development model, not just editing - file systems, searching, Mail and News and even FTP (file transfers) and web browsing. Some people view it as practically an operating system, lacking only a job scheduler, device driver, and low level operating system interfaces. Had Emacs Lisp been written as both a compiler AND an interpreter, we may have an Emacs operating system by now! ;-)

Does that further confuse matters or clarify them? I was not intended to take issue with your preference. After all, that's what it is - a personal preference. I'm just elaborating on why people tend to go back and forth on these things. It all amounts to a difference in philosophy. Both tools are at or near the top in class, especially in what they do best - Vim - straight editing, Emacs - a complete development environment, including editing.

I do hate it when Emacs locks up several frames because something somewhere is taking a lot of time to complete an operation. It would be an excellent idea to modify the Emacs Lisp executor to behave more like a virtual machine that could execute multiple threads of behavior at the "same" time.

and this is exactly what scares me...
who needs that? we all use an OS which has a great cli, we all can switch to it with one keystroke. all a body needs to have the perfect development suite is an editor, a shell and a few GNU tools.
an editor which can make coffee and swim 100 m butterfly < 1 min. :D is unnecessary and a possible threat ;) to a significant point in the 'unix philosophy': Make each program do one thing well.

of course, i shouldn't be using vim myself, but ed... ;)

There's a new editor (almost IDE), that I think is worth mentioning because it is multi-platform and full featured while still not too bloated:

Geany.

Yves.

Originally posted by masinick:
Definitely clarifies matters and I wasn't offended but thanks for the consideration.:cool:

Regards preference, I entirely agree that it's up to the individual and was merely making the point that I prefer a text editor to be good at just that one thing. If the truth be known, I was too lazy to be bothered learning all the other features of emacs and only ever used the editing function anyway. I wonder how many people have actually used emacs as a web browser.

As an aside, I remember a mate telling me a while back that he found using emacs keyboard shortcuts extensively was giving him RSI but I don't know if anyone else has experienced that.

My personal favorites are Kate and NEdit. I like Kate for its built-in terminal and UI, but I like NEdit because it's not minimalist, but it's not enormous, either. I use Kate on my main computer, but NEdit on older machines because it runs well even if you have a crummy video card/driver (it doesn't redraw stuff like crazy like most GTK-based text editors do).

Agreed
 

I am glad you were not offended. I try to be careful with what I say, and never intentionally offend, though I can be controversial at times! ;-)

I have used GNU Emacs as a Web browser. It is OK for text only pages, similar to what you would access with links or lynx. Performance is not very good. On the other hand, Emacs has an excellent news reader, and I actually prefer reading news from Emacs whenever I can. Emacs also has an Email reader. Actually, it has SEVERAL Email clients. One is an extended feature of the Gnus news reader, and that is the most interesting one. There is also a GUI mail reader called VM, a classic Email reader called RMAIL, and an interface to the Rand Mail Handler (MH) called mh-e. Very rich Email environment and a very useful, if unconventional, environment.

These days, there are lots of text editors that highlight text and use color for keywords and syntax. GNU Emacs has always been among the leaders in this space. Even if a language comes along that Emacs doesn't handle, there are scripts for each language that can readily be written and/or adapted from existing scripts to support additional languages, so Emacs has great flexibility in this space.

No doubt about it, the greatest strength for Emacs is when you are utilizing multiple features. It is a very powerful editor in its own right, but dedicated editors may be more appropriate for specific features.

Frankly, I use multiple editors as well. As my overall editor, I do go with Emacs, but I certainly do not hesitate to use various dialects of Vi, as well as GUI based editors on various platforms, including desktop editors.

just vim it!
vim has every feature an editor/IDE needs, light weighted, stable, ...

Other notable emacs features I personally use alot are: mp3 playing (emms) and IRC client (ERC) and Shell/Terminal (M-x shell, M-x ansi-term), and screen (elscreen).

It can be nice to have a split-screen buffer setup with two source files (think c++ source and header for example), have auto completion and intellisense-like features, but then also a small IRC buffer to talk to fellow developers, and a different screen with an mp3 playlist buffer, and a volume control buffer.

You can switch between your developer screen and your music screen, and when a song changes it's announced in the status line while you are in your developer screen.

I think I should try out some of these Gnu Emacs features for myself. It's very easy to get into a comfort zone and stay there but I won't know whether I'll like these things till I actually make that effort.

I know it's to late to vote but I have to say that Emacs is easier on command line begginers so I used to use it alot. now I log in graphically, open xterm and use vim from the command line

I think your right about emacs suiting beginners and it's probably related to the fact that it's so similar to bash hence less confusing for a newbie.

It may be easier to get started, but to extend emacs to make use of all the powerful features and lisp extentions out there I found it harder to figure out than vim,... Vim's .vimrc is rather humanly readable while emacs' configuration file is written in lisp.

Believe it or not, some humans actually do write (and read) Lisp. :)

No editor can beat the mighty ee :P

One nice thing about vi is that it's installed on pretty much any *nix OS, so vi is very cross platform.

I prefer the nice and simple nano editor though.

vim is the best :)

I used to be an Emacs user, but recently switched to vi. Before people cast me as John Kerry I want to say that I was getting muscle cramps in my little finger, for CONSTANTLY having to hold down the Ctrl key. Sure you pound the Esc key in vim like a "sweet piece of Veal" (any arrested development fans here?), but there's never a need to hold down a key so far out of reach. Vim is the way of the future.

Where is the mighty e3? Vi, emacs, pico, wordstar and nedit emulation and a calculator all in 10,812 bytes. Runs on Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Win9x, QNX, Atheos, BeOS, ELKS, and DOS.

Just the thing to stress-test your new 4GB quad core system.

You are probably using a PC keyboard without remapping any keys. If you had a keyboard with the Ctrl key where God intended it (i.e, above the shift key, next to the "A") then you would find it much easier to do. There are various and sundry easy ways to do this, you might consider trying one, and then your little finger cramps will go away.

Cheers.
Jim

for editing text in a terminal & CLI mode i prefer midnight commander's mcedit (has excellent syntax highlighting)...


for a GUI text editor my favorite is NEdit (has excellent syntax highlighting & macros and uses ispell for spell checking),..

vi
simply the best
don't you love rescue mode