Emacs is not an editor, it's an Emacs Lisp interpreter, so you can't really compare it to Vim. If you just need an editor which is configurable no more than de

Emacs is not an editor, it's an Emacs Lisp interpreter, so you can't really compare it to Vim. If you just need an editor which is configurable no more than deemed necessary, Vim is fine. If you need more than that, Emacs is your piece of cake. Emacs allows you to grow your own environment, which does things exactly as you wish. For instance, I've read that in Vim you can't customize where a sentence starts or ends for movement commands. Of course, in Emacs you could do that. Emacs' advantages are those shared by all Lisp environments. Another - already mentioned - killer feature of Emacs is the ability of Emacs Lisp to talk to external processes. This quote by Larry Clapp about him abandoning the development of a SLIME-like environment for Vim sums up the issues: "The more I worked on slim-vim, and the more I looked at Vim internals, the more I didn't like it, and the more I felt like I was just reinventing Emacs."(http://www.lispniks.com/pipermail/slim-vim/2007-May/000555.html http://www.lispniks.com/pipermail/slim-vim/2007-May/000555.h...)