4 ms·

No comparison? Well, I'd say there certainly is a comparison to be made. If you look at the plugins/packages available for Vim and Emacs you'll find that they

by hsitz 8y ago

No comparison? Well, I'd say there certainly is a comparison to be made. If you look at the plugins/packages available for Vim and Emacs you'll find that they're surprisingly comparable. For some niches Emacs has better packages, for some Vim has better plugin. Yes, Emacs has a better extension language. Yet somehow excellent plugins are still written in VimScript. And Vim has its own advantages. I say this as a former Vimmer who now mostly uses Emacs, mostly because of Org-mode. (Though I wouldn't use Emacs without Evil.) I did a lot of work on an Org-mode clone in Vim many years ago, which copied quite a few features and worked surprisingly well. Yes, it was somewhat hindered by limitations of Vim and VimScript. But the main problem was Org-mode had many years of head-start, and already had a large and active community of users, developers, and continual development, and there was simply no way for a resource-scarce, single-person project to catch up.

xte 8y ago
Oh, I do not intend to say that Vim is "inferior" or "bad", no intention to create religious flame, only that Vim was born and evolve as an editor, and do it's job pretty well. Emacs on contrary was born as a human-machine interface, like a DE, the ITS DE, that we can consider something like modern Lisp machines, or what we still have of them. We can compare editing capabilities of both and I think they are essentially on par, but we can't compare a car with a speedometer...
- hsitz 8y ago
  It is quite false to suggest comparison between Emacs and Vim is like comparing a "car to a speedometer". Vim is not just an editor, it is an "extensible-editor" in much the same way as Emacs is. I don't care if Emacs was born as a lisp machine, the fact is that the modern Vim-garden has as many add-on plugins and apps written for Vim as exist in Emacs' garden, possibly more. And in many cases the Vim extensions are better, despite being hobbled by an inferior extension language.
  - xte 8y ago
    My English perhaps led me to express concept in an a bit convoluted, misleading or less effective way... What I intend is simply that Vim is a powerful editor, Emacs is a sort of OS. How can you compare them outside the editor part? An example Emacs is my WM with EXWM (and few people use it even as a terminal login shell): can Vim act as a WM? It's also my MUA, and I do not know any Vim MUA, only few hacks mostly to compose a message (while some MUAs and many different apps offer Vim-like keybindings being effective, comfortable). It's also my personal finance manager, my pdf reader, it feature a built-in CAS not at the level of Maxima (supported by iMaxima as a wrapper-UI) but not marginal that can do symbolic, numeric, times, unit conversion, astronomical calculations, it have a shell that's a built-in REPL, ... Without the intention of fuel a potential flame Emacs can be even a Vim emulator with Evil&c and it's existence and popularity clearly prize Vim as an editor. As editors for me they are substantially on par, nvim offer also few nice non-editor things like a terminal-emulator that works better than sane-term/ansi-term on Emacs, it's startup time is super quick compared to Emacs but common ground end here. Of course Emacs is a text-centric UI so you may say that "being an editor" can also means being a full featured operating environment, that's true, but no Vim devs nor user I know have tried to do so with Vim while many do it with Emacs not only today but even many, many years ago. One of the nicest old post I found is http://www.sxemacs.org/ http://www.sxemacs.org/ from the early 2000's just as an example. Perhaps sometime in the future Vim or a Vim fork will try and do even a better job than Emacs, but that's only an hypothesis, not something that can be compared now.
    - rbanffy 8y ago
      Well... The joke says Emacs is a great OS with a crappy default text editor. ;-) I kind of like it.
  - armitron 8y ago
    You are being obtuse. There really is no comparison between Vim and Emacs. Vim is just an editor. Emacs is an environment, a Lisp Machine. I'm running a web browser, mail client, irc client, news client, twitter client, RSS reader and aggregator, file manager, music player, ebook reader on Emacs. 24/7. At the same time. These are all applications written in Emacs Lisp. Do people use Vim in this way? No. Look at some Symbolics Genera videos on Youtube. Emacs is the closest (but still inferior) application we have to that.

by hsitz 8y ago

xte 8y ago

Oh, I do not intend to say that Vim is "inferior" or "bad", no intention to create religious flame, only that Vim was born and evolve as an editor, and do it's job pretty well. Emacs on contrary was born as a human-machine interface, like a DE, the ITS DE, that we can consider something like modern Lisp machines, or what we still have of them. We can compare editing capabilities of both and I think they are essentially on par, but we can't compare a car with a speedometer...

hsitz 8y ago
It is quite false to suggest comparison between Emacs and Vim is like comparing a "car to a speedometer". Vim is not just an editor, it is an "extensible-editor" in much the same way as Emacs is. I don't care if Emacs was born as a lisp machine, the fact is that the modern Vim-garden has as many add-on plugins and apps written for Vim as exist in Emacs' garden, possibly more. And in many cases the Vim extensions are better, despite being hobbled by an inferior extension language.
- xte 8y ago
  My English perhaps led me to express concept in an a bit convoluted, misleading or less effective way... What I intend is simply that Vim is a powerful editor, Emacs is a sort of OS. How can you compare them outside the editor part? An example Emacs is my WM with EXWM (and few people use it even as a terminal login shell): can Vim act as a WM? It's also my MUA, and I do not know any Vim MUA, only few hacks mostly to compose a message (while some MUAs and many different apps offer Vim-like keybindings being effective, comfortable). It's also my personal finance manager, my pdf reader, it feature a built-in CAS not at the level of Maxima (supported by iMaxima as a wrapper-UI) but not marginal that can do symbolic, numeric, times, unit conversion, astronomical calculations, it have a shell that's a built-in REPL, ... Without the intention of fuel a potential flame Emacs can be even a Vim emulator with Evil&c and it's existence and popularity clearly prize Vim as an editor. As editors for me they are substantially on par, nvim offer also few nice non-editor things like a terminal-emulator that works better than sane-term/ansi-term on Emacs, it's startup time is super quick compared to Emacs but common ground end here. Of course Emacs is a text-centric UI so you may say that "being an editor" can also means being a full featured operating environment, that's true, but no Vim devs nor user I know have tried to do so with Vim while many do it with Emacs not only today but even many, many years ago. One of the nicest old post I found is http://www.sxemacs.org/ http://www.sxemacs.org/ from the early 2000's just as an example. Perhaps sometime in the future Vim or a Vim fork will try and do even a better job than Emacs, but that's only an hypothesis, not something that can be compared now.
  - rbanffy 8y ago
    Well... The joke says Emacs is a great OS with a crappy default text editor. ;-) I kind of like it.
- armitron 8y ago
  You are being obtuse. There really is no comparison between Vim and Emacs. Vim is just an editor. Emacs is an environment, a Lisp Machine. I'm running a web browser, mail client, irc client, news client, twitter client, RSS reader and aggregator, file manager, music player, ebook reader on Emacs. 24/7. At the same time. These are all applications written in Emacs Lisp. Do people use Vim in this way? No. Look at some Symbolics Genera videos on Youtube. Emacs is the closest (but still inferior) application we have to that.