The One True Text Editor

I consider it strange that he begins his Vi/Vim tutorial with a page of (bad) Emacs bashing. I mean, he obviously knows the virtues of his editor (I skimmed the next few pages), but why begin it with comments like this one:<p><pre><code> &#62; Emacs is based in Lisp. 'Nuff said. </code></pre> What is that supposed to mean? You can critize Elisp for not having lexically scoped variables (although there is lexical-let in 'cl) or tail-call optimization. But the above "statement" sounds as if he has never looked at Elisp code. Btw. if you are new to Emacs, make sure to have the sources installed as well - you can then look at the implementation of every function with<p><pre><code> C-h f function-name </code></pre> and then selecting the filename (this is also true of the functions and special forms written in C). If you do this for a while, you will recognize that the Emacs programming model makes sense - and it's not so much because of or in spite of Lisp - it's more because of the Emacs-specific abstractions (point, buffers, markers, buffer-local variables, ...) that are quite different from the usual paradigms most of us are used to, but nevertheless very powerful for text-munging.<p><pre><code> &#62; Vi commands are a Unix standard. </code></pre> yeah, but bash (for example) and other programs using the Readline library default to Emacs keybindings...<p><pre><code> &#62; Cleaner interface. Only one line is used &#62; up for commands; everything else is your text. &#62; Easy to read. Good. </code></pre> ok, my Emacs uses two lines (one for the modeline and one for the minibuffer). Of course, ed has a <i>much</i> cleaner interface than both Vi/Emacs...

Being another hopeless victim of modal editing, I do have sometimes those "I press a key and it appears on the screen?! What is this madness!" moments when using other editors. However, I do not think that Vim is The One True Text Editor. Actually, I am envious of Emacs users for their flexible, programmable text editor (operating system? CLI application framework?), but couldn't make the switch yet, I really do miss the Vim interface.

I tried to switch to emacs around a year ago. I even posted a thread here labeled <i>Ask YC: Why is emacs a great editor?</i> (<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=313025" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=313025</a>) Even though I got some great feedback and lots of tips and tricks I never got friendly with the editor. The learning curve was simply too steep, the way of doing things too arcane and the usability too bad.<p>I'm not denouncing emacs, a lot of people I hold in very high regard would commit suicide if they couldn't use it, I'm just saying that emacs is like Richard Stallman: An indisputable genius, but to work with him you have to do things his way, and share his beliefs about the world. Which I don't.

Wasn't there a rule about not introducing classic flamewar subjects ?<p>There are ony two subjects contending for the top spot in 'the most flamewar attraction power graph', the first is significant whitespace in python, the second is Vi vs Emacs (and to avoid starting a flamewar by choosing a particular order, I'll repeat them alphabetically, Emacs vs Vi).<p>The rest of the subjects (MySQl vs postgresql, Windows vs Linux and so on) are mild by comparison.

what amazes me with emacs is that every time I learn something new AND use it. Recently I've found out about irc in it, I use eshell constantly, now I've found out about gomoku.

I'm an Emacs user but I do sometimes commit the heresy of looking at Vi and wondering. Not that I'd ever want to leave the wonderful environment I have in Emacs with my large (and growing) collection of customizations but the modal editing and compossable commands do look like they could be pretty cool once you get used to them ("7 habbits of effective text editing" shows some pretty cool stuff).<p>So anyway, has anyone used Viper much? I notice it has WIZARD mode which claims to keep all of your Emacs customizations and keys working. So is Viper just for Vi refugees in an Emacs world or might it be useful for a Emacs user wanting to see what it's all about?

I do most of my editing in emacs. I tried fairly hard to learn vi back in the late 1990s (even buying the O'Relly book for help), but I cannot get the habit of separate command and writing modes; I very frequently forget about modes altogether, and even when I don't I forget which mode I'm in until I try to type something.<p>I usually have several emacs sessions suspended and ready for me to work on with an fg command, but I have also written a script that lets me easily use cat to append to or create a new text file from the command line, when I just want to add a little without waiting for a new emacs session to load.

Vim rocks!...when emacs is not available.

He spent an hour trying to quit? Did it ever occur to him to use C-z? That's pretty standard in Unix, and would have dropped him back to the terminal so he could kill it easily. He's acting like C-x C-c is somehow WAY more arcane than :q!. To each his own, I suppose.

&#62; Emacs is based in Lisp. 'Nuff said.<p>'Nuff said indeed.

Pfff, just type your stuff in stdin.

Emacs is for people who want to have a versatile do-it-all environment.<p>Vim is for people who want to process text efficiently.<p>Typically, software with such a high level of integration sucks. It's a collection of mediocre tools rather than one excellent tool.<p>My combination of Vim + irssi + mutt + ddd is greater than any emacs tools as they are cherry picked to be the best at their job rather than the most integrated. I know. I binned emacs for them.<p>Emacs is effectively a somewhat less harsh form of vendor lock in.

Knowing vi means that on any machine you have the ability to edit text... not a bad trade-off, if you ask me. It's also a nice break if you're tired of a Macintosh or Vista UAC asking you every ten seconds if you really want to do what you just tried to do.