5 ms·

I used to think the split between vim and emacs users was roughly 50/50, but reading posts here it seems more like 90/10. Why is it that people here prefer vim

by throwaway1980 13y ago

I used to think the split between vim and emacs users was roughly 50/50, but reading posts here it seems more like 90/10. Why is it that people here prefer vim to emacs? I'm not asking why is vim better than emacs, but what is it about HN that means more vim users. Certainly in free software circles emacs is equally popular. Is it just a cultural thing where people tend to stick with what they first learned and what their coworkers are using?

plam 13y ago
my whole office use emacs for clojure dev but I use vim. I tried emacs for a few days on more than one occasions but simply couldn't bear the physical awkwardness of the key combos (I did remap ctrl to caps).
- terhechte 13y ago
  Try Evil Mode with Emacs for Clojure. Its pretty close to vim
- xaritas 13y ago
  I use emacs but I also dislike the "you can rebind any keys you want, as long as the sequence begins with C-c". As it turns out emacs doesn't user the super key at all (Apple key on Mac keyboards, Windows key [I think?] on Other). You can dramatically increase the number of comfortable chords available to you by taking advantage of this, e.g.: (global-set-key (kbd "s-l") 'forward-word)
  - unlogic 13y ago
    Not using a Super key is actually a great feature. My Super key is used solely in the AwesomeWM (a window manager) commands, so the two (awesome and emacs) never clash on who will handle a key combination. I was very unpleasantly surprised when I discovered that OS X uses a single Control key for some of its hotkeys (like C-up/down) which I bind in Emacs for my own purposes.
  - quiesce 13y ago
    While the OS-specific keys are sometimes called super, they are not "super" in emacs terminology. Also, if you skim M-x describe-bindings you will find quite a few bindings beginning with s-. EDIT: If you really want access to a less crowded namespace, using (global-set-key "\C-z" nil) to free up the c-z prefix and binding Hyper are popular. If you are feeling a little confined, key chord[1] will allow you to get creative with your bindings. [1] http://www.emacswiki.org/KeyChord http://www.emacswiki.org/KeyChord
  - aerique 13y ago
    I've never paid attention to the C-c convention and liberally bound commands to whatever key I preferred.
- mtdewcmu 13y ago
  I'm glad someone mentioned this. I used emacs for years and was totally ignorant of vi/vim, but I started getting pain in my hand from all the key-combos. I was skeptical of modes, but it turns out to be pretty natural, and I actually like the concept of editing as a sequence of transactions with a start and end, rather than one continuous stream. I've never gone overboard with customizing either editor, so for me it was primarily ergonomics.
Swizec 13y ago
I use vim for editing configs (especially on servers) and emacs for writing code. But I think a lot if not most of HN are actually SublimeText fans, not vim fans.
- ameen 13y ago
  True that. I tried getting into the whole Vim/Emacs war. While Vim seemed relatively easy (I already had some experience with Vi) Emacs was a chore to work with. Sublime Text gets the job done, fast and painlessly.
- laumars 13y ago
  Weirdly Sublime Text is one of the few text editors that I not only dislike, but struggle to understand the appeal that others have with it (and I say weirdly, because even with the other editors that I disliked, I've at least understood the appeal of them from an academic perspective). The last time I tried ST2, it jarred with my system themes and didn't offer any additional functionality that wasn't already present with the other editors that I used at that time. Plus the other editors were open source where as ST2 was shareware (I'm guessing that may have changed now given the number of people who currently use it?) I'm open to having my opinion changed though - if one of the Sublime Text fans want to put their case forward :) (Or at least better relating to why it's become so popular)
  - nnq 13y ago
    Try to thinks about the whole class of editors defined by Textmate, Sublime Text and E-TextEditor. It's mainly about offering all the features of something like Notepad++ (easy to use menus and settings, arbitrary multiple cursors, support for easy to use plugins without touching config files), plus: - offering that unnamed aesthetic quality of "UX flow" (ie. try looking form something in Notepad++'s settings panes - Eclipse will seem nice and clean in comparison!) - being cross platform and easily runnable from a memory stick - having what feels like "no learning curve" - you can basically move from Eclipse or VS and be productive in Sublime Text from second 0, and achieve enough productivity to actually be in "coding flow" after just 1hr spent learning the shortcuts and hunting for needed plugins - following the "don't make me think!" philosophy: this basically restates the first and the previous points and captures in one sense the "unnamed quality" that this class of editors aspires to. I you want to understand "the zen" of this, think of the multiple cursors workflow where you'd catr+click 3 different places and start typing and the alternative would be doing a regex-based search and replace on a selection (or a bloody copy paste to the 2nd and 3rd location, I know... but pretend you didn't think of this :) ), but his would actually require you to "think" about what you are doing, therefore breaking the "don't make me think" philosophy. ...all I've said above has many holes, but I understand the appeal of Sublime Text (and I actually use it - it's my favorite tool for editing plain text files, yaml files or html/js/php soup). Though, for real work, nothing beats a decent IDE with a good Vim emulation plugin :)
kryptiskt 13y ago
Vim is a nifty editor, using Emacs is for most a major investment in adapting your workflow to it, Emacs users tend to want to do everything possible in it. Of course you can use Emacs as just another editor, but the culture around it is to use as a multi-purpose toolbox. It's not so strange that Emacs users would be fewer but far more invested. For Vim users the keybindings are essential, but for most the scripts aren't that important, that's why other editors can seduce them by offering vi keybindings. But an Emacs user shivers at the thought of losing all their elisp. (Note: Vim user)
- masklinn 13y ago
  > But an Emacs user shivers at the thought of losing all their elisp. For one's own machine yes, for editing on somebody else's or on a server... meh. I'd sooner have a barebones emacs (aka mg) than have to use vi, if only because I'll corrupt half the file in about 10 seconds in vi.
gexla 13y ago
I use Emacs for org mode and other things that I want to run in a terminal that I can stuff into Emacs, such as an IRC client. I use Vim for code editing. Sure, you can use Evil, but I feel like Vim is more than keybindings. I love Vim for the whole package, the Vim way of doing things and you can't get that using just Vim keybindings. I use Tmux for managing multiple sessions, so I generally have a lot of Vim sessions going at one time. Emacs is just another session for me, so it's a regular part of my workflow to switch back and forth.
glurgh 13y ago
I think it's partially a cultural thing and partially, the fact that one is an editor and the other one a bit closer to a lifestyle choice. Even if you just google them and read the snippets - vim will tell you that it's a vi clone and looking for vi will say "vi is a screen-oriented text editor originally created for the Unix operating system." Emacs will tell you it's an "extensible, customizable, self-documenting real-time display editor." That's quite a mouthful, especially if all you had in mind was to edit some text. And I say this with all the nostalgic affection of a long-time emacs user.
buro9 13y ago
I wanted a default tool I could find and use on any machine I connected to. vim is always there, even on servers. I wanted something I could use over SSH, even on really bad connections such as mobile. vim works great over poor connections. I barely use plugins, and seldom configure syntax highlighting. On the desktop I may use vim, but tend to use Sublime Text for everything. Go, Java, HTML, CSS, JavaScript (node and browser)... Sublime Text serves me really well and works the way I want to work. Before Sublime Text I was 100% vim, after Sublime Text I'm 80/20 ST/vim. But for whenever there isn't ST, vim is always there.
- davidw 13y ago
  > vim is always there, even on servers. This argument made sense 20 years ago, when it was quite possible that you'd fine yourself on some weird IRIX machine that had nothing much installed, but you could be sure vi was there. These days, apt-get install emacs or the redhat equivalent is not really a problem. > I wanted something I could use over SSH, Emacs has a remote connection mode, so that you fetch the file, edit it locally, and then save it to the remote machine.
  - buro9 13y ago
    It still applies, servers I connect to tend to be locked enough that users are unable to install stuff. The user (me) would need to get a ticket opened to have it added to the config, whereas vim is already there. And on the latter, if the issue is a live server needing immediate attention and a config change, and I'm mobile and using my Android device and have the rights to edit a file and the access certificate locally I could just do it in vim in moments over SSH. Whereas I've no clue as to what app I'd need to install on my phone to act as a passable editor for the file, and why retrieve a whole file (potentially large config) when you just want to make a one-line change? vim just works for my use-case, no config required, no local app required, just edit the file, save it, test and be done. Both of those solutions just feel clunky, why fight to use Emacs when you could just use vim? Hence, I just use vim, it works, I'm happy as the job is done.
    - 13y ago
preavy 13y ago
I prefer Emacs, but sometimes think Vim works better on laptops as everything is right under your fingers. Emacs is much more comfortable on a full-size keyboard. So I wonder whether there's any correlation between Emacs/desktop and Vim/laptop.
- john2x 13y ago
  There was a post (or was it a comment) here a couple months ago about Emacs/Vim users and the sizes of their hands. I have tiny hands and when I tried (still trying every now and then) to learn Emacs, I found it difficult to execute its keyboard commands. Trying it on a mechanical keyboard was even worse.
  - quiesce 13y ago
    I had a similar issue until getting a HHKB[1] some years ago. The extremely compact design with full-sized keys made it much easier to coax my hands into dancing through emacs' chords. As "buy an expensive keyboard to possibly make learning emacs easier" is the advice of the mad, I would suggest that you be fearless in rebinding things. Learning the default bindings is far less important than learning the functionality of emacs and how to extend and customise it. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Hacking_Keyboard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Hacking_Keyboard
astrobe_ 13y ago
I don't know about HN readers ratio, but I am split 50/50. Vim feels better when editing code and has many things right out-of-the-box. Emacs offers much more features in a more integrated way, but is heavy-weight, has to be customized, and has it's kludges. So I use Emacs or Vim according to my current mood. Also, although Evil is an awesome piece of work, the fact that some buffers cannot use that mode breaks the workflow too much for me.
klibertp 13y ago
I think that's almost 100% cultural thing. I know both editors quite well now, and to learn them I had to read tons of people's posts and such. In Emacs (unofficial) writings I saw much more "holier-than-thou" attitude, similar to what they call "smug lisp weenies". Vim's writings are down to earth, focused on pragmatics and making no unneeded comparisons. While technically Emacs users and advocates are right, they lose big time in "marketing" or "public relations". I don't really think that this is going to be fixed.
da3da 13y ago
I started out using vim because when I first looked at it and emacs, vim seemed like the more elegant of the two. I tried both out one afternoon, and the commands in vim made more sense to me than those in emacs. But after taking a class where we were basically forced to use emacs, I've really come to appreciate it more and have found myself much more productive in it than in vim.

plam 13y ago

my whole office use emacs for clojure dev but I use vim. I tried emacs for a few days on more than one occasions but simply couldn't bear the physical awkwardness of the key combos (I did remap ctrl to caps).

terhechte 13y ago
Try Evil Mode with Emacs for Clojure. Its pretty close to vim
xaritas 13y ago
I use emacs but I also dislike the "you can rebind any keys you want, as long as the sequence begins with C-c". As it turns out emacs doesn't user the super key at all (Apple key on Mac keyboards, Windows key [I think?] on Other). You can dramatically increase the number of comfortable chords available to you by taking advantage of this, e.g.: (global-set-key (kbd "s-l") 'forward-word)
- unlogic 13y ago
  Not using a Super key is actually a great feature. My Super key is used solely in the AwesomeWM (a window manager) commands, so the two (awesome and emacs) never clash on who will handle a key combination. I was very unpleasantly surprised when I discovered that OS X uses a single Control key for some of its hotkeys (like C-up/down) which I bind in Emacs for my own purposes.
- quiesce 13y ago
  While the OS-specific keys are sometimes called super, they are not "super" in emacs terminology. Also, if you skim M-x describe-bindings you will find quite a few bindings beginning with s-. EDIT: If you really want access to a less crowded namespace, using (global-set-key "\C-z" nil) to free up the c-z prefix and binding Hyper are popular. If you are feeling a little confined, key chord[1] will allow you to get creative with your bindings. [1] http://www.emacswiki.org/KeyChord http://www.emacswiki.org/KeyChord
- aerique 13y ago
  I've never paid attention to the C-c convention and liberally bound commands to whatever key I preferred.
mtdewcmu 13y ago
I'm glad someone mentioned this. I used emacs for years and was totally ignorant of vi/vim, but I started getting pain in my hand from all the key-combos. I was skeptical of modes, but it turns out to be pretty natural, and I actually like the concept of editing as a sequence of transactions with a start and end, rather than one continuous stream. I've never gone overboard with customizing either editor, so for me it was primarily ergonomics.

Swizec 13y ago

I use vim for editing configs (especially on servers) and emacs for writing code. But I think a lot if not most of HN are actually SublimeText fans, not vim fans.

ameen 13y ago
True that. I tried getting into the whole Vim/Emacs war. While Vim seemed relatively easy (I already had some experience with Vi) Emacs was a chore to work with. Sublime Text gets the job done, fast and painlessly.
laumars 13y ago
Weirdly Sublime Text is one of the few text editors that I not only dislike, but struggle to understand the appeal that others have with it (and I say weirdly, because even with the other editors that I disliked, I've at least understood the appeal of them from an academic perspective). The last time I tried ST2, it jarred with my system themes and didn't offer any additional functionality that wasn't already present with the other editors that I used at that time. Plus the other editors were open source where as ST2 was shareware (I'm guessing that may have changed now given the number of people who currently use it?) I'm open to having my opinion changed though - if one of the Sublime Text fans want to put their case forward :) (Or at least better relating to why it's become so popular)
- nnq 13y ago
  Try to thinks about the whole class of editors defined by Textmate, Sublime Text and E-TextEditor. It's mainly about offering all the features of something like Notepad++ (easy to use menus and settings, arbitrary multiple cursors, support for easy to use plugins without touching config files), plus: - offering that unnamed aesthetic quality of "UX flow" (ie. try looking form something in Notepad++'s settings panes - Eclipse will seem nice and clean in comparison!) - being cross platform and easily runnable from a memory stick - having what feels like "no learning curve" - you can basically move from Eclipse or VS and be productive in Sublime Text from second 0, and achieve enough productivity to actually be in "coding flow" after just 1hr spent learning the shortcuts and hunting for needed plugins - following the "don't make me think!" philosophy: this basically restates the first and the previous points and captures in one sense the "unnamed quality" that this class of editors aspires to. I you want to understand "the zen" of this, think of the multiple cursors workflow where you'd catr+click 3 different places and start typing and the alternative would be doing a regex-based search and replace on a selection (or a bloody copy paste to the 2nd and 3rd location, I know... but pretend you didn't think of this :) ), but his would actually require you to "think" about what you are doing, therefore breaking the "don't make me think" philosophy. ...all I've said above has many holes, but I understand the appeal of Sublime Text (and I actually use it - it's my favorite tool for editing plain text files, yaml files or html/js/php soup). Though, for real work, nothing beats a decent IDE with a good Vim emulation plugin :)

kryptiskt 13y ago

Vim is a nifty editor, using Emacs is for most a major investment in adapting your workflow to it, Emacs users tend to want to do everything possible in it. Of course you can use Emacs as just another editor, but the culture around it is to use as a multi-purpose toolbox. It's not so strange that Emacs users would be fewer but far more invested. For Vim users the keybindings are essential, but for most the scripts aren't that important, that's why other editors can seduce them by offering vi keybindings. But an Emacs user shivers at the thought of losing all their elisp. (Note: Vim user)

masklinn 13y ago
> But an Emacs user shivers at the thought of losing all their elisp. For one's own machine yes, for editing on somebody else's or on a server... meh. I'd sooner have a barebones emacs (aka mg) than have to use vi, if only because I'll corrupt half the file in about 10 seconds in vi.

gexla 13y ago

I use Emacs for org mode and other things that I want to run in a terminal that I can stuff into Emacs, such as an IRC client. I use Vim for code editing. Sure, you can use Evil, but I feel like Vim is more than keybindings. I love Vim for the whole package, the Vim way of doing things and you can't get that using just Vim keybindings. I use Tmux for managing multiple sessions, so I generally have a lot of Vim sessions going at one time. Emacs is just another session for me, so it's a regular part of my workflow to switch back and forth.

glurgh 13y ago

I think it's partially a cultural thing and partially, the fact that one is an editor and the other one a bit closer to a lifestyle choice. Even if you just google them and read the snippets - vim will tell you that it's a vi clone and looking for vi will say "vi is a screen-oriented text editor originally created for the Unix operating system." Emacs will tell you it's an "extensible, customizable, self-documenting real-time display editor." That's quite a mouthful, especially if all you had in mind was to edit some text. And I say this with all the nostalgic affection of a long-time emacs user.

buro9 13y ago

I wanted a default tool I could find and use on any machine I connected to. vim is always there, even on servers. I wanted something I could use over SSH, even on really bad connections such as mobile. vim works great over poor connections. I barely use plugins, and seldom configure syntax highlighting. On the desktop I may use vim, but tend to use Sublime Text for everything. Go, Java, HTML, CSS, JavaScript (node and browser)... Sublime Text serves me really well and works the way I want to work. Before Sublime Text I was 100% vim, after Sublime Text I'm 80/20 ST/vim. But for whenever there isn't ST, vim is always there.

davidw 13y ago
> vim is always there, even on servers. This argument made sense 20 years ago, when it was quite possible that you'd fine yourself on some weird IRIX machine that had nothing much installed, but you could be sure vi was there. These days, apt-get install emacs or the redhat equivalent is not really a problem. > I wanted something I could use over SSH, Emacs has a remote connection mode, so that you fetch the file, edit it locally, and then save it to the remote machine.
- buro9 13y ago
  It still applies, servers I connect to tend to be locked enough that users are unable to install stuff. The user (me) would need to get a ticket opened to have it added to the config, whereas vim is already there. And on the latter, if the issue is a live server needing immediate attention and a config change, and I'm mobile and using my Android device and have the rights to edit a file and the access certificate locally I could just do it in vim in moments over SSH. Whereas I've no clue as to what app I'd need to install on my phone to act as a passable editor for the file, and why retrieve a whole file (potentially large config) when you just want to make a one-line change? vim just works for my use-case, no config required, no local app required, just edit the file, save it, test and be done. Both of those solutions just feel clunky, why fight to use Emacs when you could just use vim? Hence, I just use vim, it works, I'm happy as the job is done.
  - 13y ago

preavy 13y ago

I prefer Emacs, but sometimes think Vim works better on laptops as everything is right under your fingers. Emacs is much more comfortable on a full-size keyboard. So I wonder whether there's any correlation between Emacs/desktop and Vim/laptop.

john2x 13y ago
There was a post (or was it a comment) here a couple months ago about Emacs/Vim users and the sizes of their hands. I have tiny hands and when I tried (still trying every now and then) to learn Emacs, I found it difficult to execute its keyboard commands. Trying it on a mechanical keyboard was even worse.
- quiesce 13y ago
  I had a similar issue until getting a HHKB[1] some years ago. The extremely compact design with full-sized keys made it much easier to coax my hands into dancing through emacs' chords. As "buy an expensive keyboard to possibly make learning emacs easier" is the advice of the mad, I would suggest that you be fearless in rebinding things. Learning the default bindings is far less important than learning the functionality of emacs and how to extend and customise it. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Hacking_Keyboard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Hacking_Keyboard

astrobe_ 13y ago

I don't know about HN readers ratio, but I am split 50/50. Vim feels better when editing code and has many things right out-of-the-box. Emacs offers much more features in a more integrated way, but is heavy-weight, has to be customized, and has it's kludges. So I use Emacs or Vim according to my current mood. Also, although Evil is an awesome piece of work, the fact that some buffers cannot use that mode breaks the workflow too much for me.

klibertp 13y ago

I think that's almost 100% cultural thing. I know both editors quite well now, and to learn them I had to read tons of people's posts and such. In Emacs (unofficial) writings I saw much more "holier-than-thou" attitude, similar to what they call "smug lisp weenies". Vim's writings are down to earth, focused on pragmatics and making no unneeded comparisons. While technically Emacs users and advocates are right, they lose big time in "marketing" or "public relations". I don't really think that this is going to be fixed.

da3da 13y ago

I started out using vim because when I first looked at it and emacs, vim seemed like the more elegant of the two. I tried both out one afternoon, and the commands in vim made more sense to me than those in emacs. But after taking a class where we were basically forced to use emacs, I've really come to appreciate it more and have found myself much more productive in it than in vim.