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I've always assumed the opposite with how people say emacs is a nice OS and poor editor... What does Vim over emacs?

jrumbut 6y ago
It's not a comment on quality or usefulness, and only indirectly its resource consumption (vi/vim consumes less than emacs in its default configuration), it's really about standards. vi and the ex editor language are part of the POSIX standard and were around early in the history of BSD. See the history here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi For a well worn joke on the subject, "Ed is the standard!": https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html
cat199 6y ago
this is huge flamewar territory, but this is a bit 'off' question wise - alot of the current state of things is due to historical precedent - some details: - (original) vi was on most unices from the mid-80s onwards out of the box - (gnu/lucid) emacs was an additional install (not getting into other emacs flavors - original teco emacs was fairly small i believe). - original vi just had basic editing and at some point a hardcoded lisp mode, no addons vs gnu emacs which was a programmable editing environment running within a lisp interpreter - remeber in the early days, people built whole custom hardware to be able to run lisp with sufficient complexity (see also: lisp machines, twenex, etc), so using lisp for your editor was in some sense the definition of 'overkill', depending on ones view of what an editor should do - Also, from late-80s->90s era if you wanted a GUI for your text editor you probably used emacs, and real vi never had a gui option - put another way emacs was the only one of the two linked to gui libraries. - vim vs vi: most obvious difference (IMHO) feature wise is that vim adds vimscript, which is an interpreted programming language, so now editing modes are extensible, etc (as was the case in emacs before). detail: vim codebase is not based on vi codebase. since vi was just about everywhere and emacs was a (fairly large) package, you had more general vi knowledge vs emacs 'in the culture' since even an emacs user might need to know vi but not usually the other way around, and so vi (later vim, as linux distros switched their 'default vi' to 'vim') gained more install base by default. Then, people hearing about emacs likely hear the 'vi vs emacs' arguments and never try it since there are now many more choices, they've learned vi, they prefer an IDE, etc (in the old days there was much less choice, main 2 were vi and emacs, and emacs was probably somewhere on your managed LAN somewhere if you wanted to give it a shot) most of the 'vi vs emacs' arguments are rooted in the real-vi vs fsf-emacs era and are basically obsolete in a modern vim era, since everyone is using gui library vim with vimscript, which basically means the same thing in terms of 'bloat' (both editors contain engines to display text in cli or gui mode and embed a language interpreter). Basically what was once valid internet lore kept getting past down, and the 'minimalism' of vim was confused with being 'minimal' in terms of what people meant in the original vi-vs-emacs discussions. Emacs does contain 'non editor' functions e.g. networking, etc, so the core is probably a bit bigger than the core of vim, but when people are still using these comparisons and talking about 'emacs bloat' while their preferred editor is some electron based thing, we've lost a bit of the point/message..
- octorian 6y ago
  > vim vs vi: most obvious difference (IMHO) feature wise is that vim adds vimscript IMHO, the most obvious difference is that in vim you can kinda just press "i" and pretend its a normal text editor. You know, the kind anyone coming from another OS would already be familiar with. Try doing this in regular vi, and you'll be cursing and pulling your hair out. Today, I don't put much stock into anyone expressing an opinion in the "vi vs emacs" wars, because 90% of the people claiming a preference for vi seem to actually be vim users. Using vim is a much more pleasant experience than using good old classic vi.
harrygeez 6y ago
I love Emacs and have been using it for years but whenever I want to make a really quick edit, i.e. writing a git commit I almost always reach for vi because by the time Emacs loaded I would've been done committing with vi, at least with a slower machine. I know some people run Emacs in daemon mode, but it's not always convenient to do that This and when I ssh into any machine, I know there will be a vi at the very least
- Kaze404 6y ago
  > This and when I ssh into any machine, I know there will be a vi at the very least You could use emacs for that. Editing over ssh using TRAMP works perfectly in every case I've used it.
alwillis 6y ago
It’s composability is Vim’s killer feature. This post is what got me started on Vim: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-most-productive-shortcut-with-vim/1220118#1220118 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-mos...
sqrt17 6y ago
1) vim is easier on your hands if you're on a high-latency connection (i.e. usable in a terminal) and/or get tired of chording (i.e. having to press Ctrl along with random keys). 2) I've found vim's plugin systems (Pathogen, Vundle, vim-plug) vastly more intuitive than Emacs' version with package-install and activating one of several repositories (Milk, ELPA, MELPA, whatever) - you install the same plugin regardless of whether you're using Vundle or vim-plug 3) vim and its packages are vastly easier to configure - this is subjective and may be much improved in Doom Emacs/Spacemacs, but in general vim packages have a bunch of global variables that you can set to a number or a string whereas most emacs packages need you to define elisp functions and/or nontrivial data structures, with no sane defaults to fall back on if you want things just to work

It's not a comment on quality or usefulness, and only indirectly its resource consumption (vi/vim consumes less than emacs in its default configuration), it's really about standards. vi and the ex editor language are part of the POSIX standard and were around early in the history of BSD. See the history here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi For a well worn joke on the subject, "Ed is the standard!": https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html

cat199 6y ago

this is huge flamewar territory, but this is a bit 'off' question wise - alot of the current state of things is due to historical precedent - some details: - (original) vi was on most unices from the mid-80s onwards out of the box - (gnu/lucid) emacs was an additional install (not getting into other emacs flavors - original teco emacs was fairly small i believe). - original vi just had basic editing and at some point a hardcoded lisp mode, no addons vs gnu emacs which was a programmable editing environment running within a lisp interpreter - remeber in the early days, people built whole custom hardware to be able to run lisp with sufficient complexity (see also: lisp machines, twenex, etc), so using lisp for your editor was in some sense the definition of 'overkill', depending on ones view of what an editor should do - Also, from late-80s->90s era if you wanted a GUI for your text editor you probably used emacs, and real vi never had a gui option - put another way emacs was the only one of the two linked to gui libraries. - vim vs vi: most obvious difference (IMHO) feature wise is that vim adds vimscript, which is an interpreted programming language, so now editing modes are extensible, etc (as was the case in emacs before). detail: vim codebase is not based on vi codebase. since vi was just about everywhere and emacs was a (fairly large) package, you had more general vi knowledge vs emacs 'in the culture' since even an emacs user might need to know vi but not usually the other way around, and so vi (later vim, as linux distros switched their 'default vi' to 'vim') gained more install base by default. Then, people hearing about emacs likely hear the 'vi vs emacs' arguments and never try it since there are now many more choices, they've learned vi, they prefer an IDE, etc (in the old days there was much less choice, main 2 were vi and emacs, and emacs was probably somewhere on your managed LAN somewhere if you wanted to give it a shot) most of the 'vi vs emacs' arguments are rooted in the real-vi vs fsf-emacs era and are basically obsolete in a modern vim era, since everyone is using gui library vim with vimscript, which basically means the same thing in terms of 'bloat' (both editors contain engines to display text in cli or gui mode and embed a language interpreter). Basically what was once valid internet lore kept getting past down, and the 'minimalism' of vim was confused with being 'minimal' in terms of what people meant in the original vi-vs-emacs discussions. Emacs does contain 'non editor' functions e.g. networking, etc, so the core is probably a bit bigger than the core of vim, but when people are still using these comparisons and talking about 'emacs bloat' while their preferred editor is some electron based thing, we've lost a bit of the point/message..

octorian 6y ago
> vim vs vi: most obvious difference (IMHO) feature wise is that vim adds vimscript IMHO, the most obvious difference is that in vim you can kinda just press "i" and pretend its a normal text editor. You know, the kind anyone coming from another OS would already be familiar with. Try doing this in regular vi, and you'll be cursing and pulling your hair out. Today, I don't put much stock into anyone expressing an opinion in the "vi vs emacs" wars, because 90% of the people claiming a preference for vi seem to actually be vim users. Using vim is a much more pleasant experience than using good old classic vi.

harrygeez 6y ago

I love Emacs and have been using it for years but whenever I want to make a really quick edit, i.e. writing a git commit I almost always reach for vi because by the time Emacs loaded I would've been done committing with vi, at least with a slower machine. I know some people run Emacs in daemon mode, but it's not always convenient to do that This and when I ssh into any machine, I know there will be a vi at the very least

Kaze404 6y ago
> This and when I ssh into any machine, I know there will be a vi at the very least You could use emacs for that. Editing over ssh using TRAMP works perfectly in every case I've used it.

alwillis 6y ago

It’s composability is Vim’s killer feature. This post is what got me started on Vim: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-most-productive-shortcut-with-vim/1220118#1220118 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-mos...

sqrt17 6y ago

1) vim is easier on your hands if you're on a high-latency connection (i.e. usable in a terminal) and/or get tired of chording (i.e. having to press Ctrl along with random keys). 2) I've found vim's plugin systems (Pathogen, Vundle, vim-plug) vastly more intuitive than Emacs' version with package-install and activating one of several repositories (Milk, ELPA, MELPA, whatever) - you install the same plugin regardless of whether you're using Vundle or vim-plug 3) vim and its packages are vastly easier to configure - this is subjective and may be much improved in Doom Emacs/Spacemacs, but in general vim packages have a bunch of global variables that you can set to a number or a string whereas most emacs packages need you to define elisp functions and/or nontrivial data structures, with no sane defaults to fall back on if you want things just to work