Emacs vs Vim
Which is best?
In the past year I’ve successfully changed my primary text editor from TextMate to Emacs. As a web developer my needs aren’t great, but my decision to switch was fueled by my never-satisfied question of: “Am I using the best text editor?” In short, my quest lead me to a fork in the road… emacs or vim.
I chose emacs. TextMate is a brilliant text editor for Mac, and I’m not going to go into all the reasons why it’s a good text editor, but features I found myself wanting were split windows, incremental searching and more powerful file-system integration (searching, filtering and editing of files). Every programmer’s preferences are different, so it stands to reason that the perfect text editor is one that is powerful and customizable enough to be tailored to each users’ preferences and needs. Emacs has not left me wanting, but a year down the line a lifehacker post titled, “Five Best Text Editors” has reawakened the burning question… Is emacs the best text editor?
If you’ve hit this brick wall and are now at the “emacs or vim” fork, here are some links that might help you come to a decision.
- According to a very recent lifehacker poll, vim (21%) beat emacs (8%) by coming second to Notepad++ (49%). I know many developers that use Notepad++ and love it, but after experiencing the power of emacs, I think only digging into vim will satisfy my expectations of a good text editor and allow me to make a more objective decision.
- Many Ruby developers have taken to emacs. There are many powerful ways emacs can be used to better the workflow of a ruby developer. “5min of Emacs” video by Geoffrey Grosenbach (of Peepcode.com) showcases this very nicely!
- Screencasts – Both emacs and vim have quite a high learning curve and personally I find screencasts and video tutorials far easier to digest than manuals and books. Probably due to vim having a larger user base there seems to be a greater number of vim video tutorials available than emacs. A great post on Nettuts+ lists some of these great resources! 25 Vim Tutorials, Screencasts and Resources
The internet is full of opinions when it comes to emacs and vim, and it can be really hard to make an objective choice. Learning both editors, considering their learning curve, is impractical; but it’s the only way to find out if the shoe fits. If you are interested in following my findings, as well as other noteworthy web related topics, please feel free to subscribe via RSS, or follow me on twitter (http://twitter.com/vorn). Also: if you have any comments on the holy war that is emacs vs vim, please leave a comment!
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I’m a Vim user, and you may disagree with what I say about other editors. I wrote a blog post recently that tries to explain why Vim is better for writers than traditional editors or word processors for actual editing. People often have trouble articulating why they like Vim. Hopefully my post succeeds at least a little.
http://desktoprevolt.wordpress.com/2010/12/16/where-is-the-edit-in-text-editor/
Thanks for your comment.
I must say, I’ve used emacs for about a year and I was well impressed. But now I’ve been using vim for just a week and I’m even more impressed!
Having an ‘insert mode’ for typing leaves so much power at your fingertips when you’re NOT in insert mode! The difference I’d say would be comparing a normal “find and replace” with something like regular expressions! I’m definitely committed to giving vim a good run at being my primary text editor!
Another thing I’ve noticed in my experience with vim is that everything feels a lot more intentional than with emacs. Using emacs feels more like hacking functionality together. Again, this is just my experience with it though.
I personally love CODA. but i guess a text editor is personal preference.
Yeah, a lot of modern text editors offer some very well integrated environment features.
Vim is now my primary editor, but I do use TextMate every now and again if I simply don’t have time at that moment to learn how to do it in Vim. I still really enjoy TextMate. A lot of the keyboard actions act as you’d expect in OS X and you can simply get the job done! It’s just a pity TextMate version 2 has taken a few more years to come out than anticipated. Otherwise I’d probably be using that.