3 ms·

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-edito

by 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

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.