Emacs or Vim: Which is better?

[wowbuntu]

Dear programmers

Which do u think is better- Emacs or Vim?

Give reasons for your preference.

Regards
Wowbuntu

[tread]

Flamebait! Flamebait! :)

I've used both, and like both .. but I prefer vim .. just because I am more used to it.

[word_virus]

Which do u think is better- Emacs or Vim?



Heheh.... you MUST be new to Linux.




















Any reasonable person would know the answer is Vim :)

[Havoc]

ed is the default text processor.

[IdoMcFly]

none, just keep the one that suit you, or both or none and use another one. this question is a classic Troll on all board all over the world...

[jerome bettis]

tried both i like vim better

i'm gonna give emacs another try later on, but i like the way vim works a lot. soo many commands if you know them all you can really kick *** in there.

[Gsibbery]

I almost always use vi (vim or elvis actually). Am learning emacs now. It seems better for programming, but there are a lot more commands to remember and on the whole I prefer vim.

[vague-]

I regularly use both, but I would say I prefer Vim. Emacs has some very powerful features available from it's network of enthusiasts - if you can be bothered to check scripts work in your version of Emacs and you have the dependencies and so on. Vim largely just gets the job done. That is not to say that some of the more reliably written Emacs extra modes are not worth using - this is the reason I regularly use both. If you said to me I could only have one, it would be Vim.

At the end of the day you will have to try them both. I am sure somebody can give a very similar argument pro-Emacs as I give for my Vim preference. You will probably like one of them - the amount of people that use each editor shows that they are both perfectly capable and well done.

[poster_nutbag]

I found Emacs to be easier to use initially. I had to use vi back when I was at university, and found it hard to get used to.

Having said that, both are very powerful. And vim or vi is found on every *nix system I can think of, so you could say it's the standard.

[wowbuntu]

Hi there someone guessed it right I AM A TOTAL NEWBIE. All I knew was that vim & emacs had religious wars:) just wanted to know which would be better for Java/C++/Perl programming.

[SNo0py]

Hi there someone guessed it right I AM A TOTAL NEWBIE. All I knew was that vim & emacs had religious wars:) just wanted to know which would be better for Java/C++/Perl programming.

Just try both and choose the one that you like more. You can even try out other editors...
That's the nice thing in GNU/Linux - there is more than one way to do things... and you have the FREEdom to choose... so just try them!

Regards,
S.

btw, the big benefit of VIM is that it is installed on almost every system.... ;)

[hamiltjr]

This is one of those wonderful debates that no one will ever agree on :)

The fact of the matter is that most people enjoy using the text editor that they first started out on.

Personally, I'm a fan of emacs...but hey, thats just me ;)

Try them both out, read some tutorials, and formulate your own opinion.

[SNo0py]

Try them both out, read some tutorials, and formulate your own opinion.Absolutely!

[SNo0py]

Personally, I'm a fan of emacs...but hey, thats just me ;)Yeah, and that is no problem for me and should be no problem for anyone else - that's called "tolerance", which seems to be not available all the time ;)

[Gsibbery]

Hi there someone guessed it right I AM A TOTAL NEWBIE. All I knew was that vim & emacs had religious wars:) just wanted to know which would be better for Java/C++/Perl programming.

Emacs has modes that specifically support those particular programming languages, whereas I don't think that vim does. That being said, if you want to use emacs you will spend a fair amount of time learning it, whereas vim you can learn in a few days. Might be best to grab some tutorials and try both and see which suits your preferences best.

By the way, there are other editors/IDEs that you may like even better such as KDevelop if you have a GUI running. Might be worth looking into as well.

[GrumpySimon]

Emacs has modes that specifically support those particular programming languages, whereas I don't think that vim does. That being said, if you want to use emacs you will spend a fair amount of time learning it, whereas vim you can learn in a few days. Might be best to grab some tutorials and try both and see which suits your preferences best.

By the way, there are other editors/IDEs that you may like even better such as KDevelop if you have a GUI running. Might be worth looking into as well.
I prefer emacs,but use vi(m) preferentially for certain editing tasks like deleting various lines - 'dd' kills the ones I don't want rapidly.

Personally, I find I'm using jed more and more often though.

--Simon

[dcraven]

Vim also adjusts it's behavior based on filetype, and to use Vim efficiently (as in using amazing features that you wouldn't have dreamed be in a text editor) may take more than a few days. No doubt though, you can be productive in it almost immediately.

Both are incredible editors and I believe can boost your programming productivity far beyond what any GUI IDE could when used effectively. That may be just an opinion though as I know many who would rather die than be separated from their baby IDE's.

Both Vim and Emacs are extendable and can do as much as you want them to. Both are highly scriptable, and both have many quality scripts (extensions) available for Free public use. I highly recommend one or the other (vim) or both (vim).

One thing I've learned while in the Linux world for the last few years, is that if someone says that some tool (bash, vim, emacs, regex, etc etc..) has a "steep learning curve", then that tool is at least worth checking out and possibly donating an afternoon to. It turns out that "steep learning curve" also translates to "more powerful than you ever imagined".

~djc

[thumper]

Personally I prefer emacs for development, but for quick hacking of config files I tend to use vi.

I like the macro facility of emacs, and you just get used to it.

[agger]

I personally prefer vi(m), but each has it pros and cons.

Emacs is a rather heavy-footprint application, so it takes some time to load, so you don't want to open and close it all the time. Emacs users normally don't close their Emacs, ever, but always have one open for editing whatever file need editing.

Vi or vim is very light-footprint, and a typical use is to navigate around in an xterm, open a file, close it again, open another, close it, use some shell command ... that's the way I've personally come to prefer it.

At the university, I hated vi which was famed to be the application that's impossible to quit (unless you know that it's ":q!", which is not very obvious to a newbie :-)) and wrote my entire thesis and all programs I made in Emacs using Latex and C.

When I got my first job, I had to use vi because there *was* no Emacs, and since then I've grown to prefer it. Vim is better than vi because it has syntax highlighting, but I normally only use vi commands while editing.

Truth is, as somebody else said: Both are absolutely great editors and both are much better that MS-Word, the OpenOffice text processor, or the native editors of applications such as Visual Developer Studio or JBuilder.

So take whichever you prefer! None is "best".

[jerome bettis]

Emacs has modes that specifically support those particular programming languages, whereas I don't think that vim does.

it does. you just have to write the .vimrc file for it. i found this page here: http://newbiedoc.sourceforge.net/tutorials/vim/appendixa.html.en which has a vimrc which is pretty slick. it has different files for different languages, and in the vimrc f2 f3 etc are mapped to switch files. personally i've only tried out the C/C++ file and it's sweet. i just wish he had ones for ruby, python, and java. looks like i'll have to write those ](*,)

One thing I've learned while in the Linux world for the last few years, is that if someone says that some tool (bash, vim, emacs, regex, etc etc..) has a "steep learning curve", then that tool is at least worth checking out and possibly donating an afternoon to. It turns out that "steep learning curve" also translates to "more powerful than you ever imagined".

excellent point i'll remember that. if i used a sig i'd put that in there. :-P

i've only been using vim for about 2 weeks and i'd say i know about 5-10% of it's features. so i suck at it but i can still get around pretty quick. everytime i use it i learn something new, so it's only a matter of time before i'm a beast at it. i actually use gvim which is nice for a lot of obvious reasons. for a noob it has the keystrokes listed in the menus.

[Gsibbery]

[QUOTE=jerome bettis]it does. you just have to write the .vimrc file for it. i found this page here: http://newbiedoc.sourceforge.net/tutorials/vim/appendixa.html.en which has a vimrc which is pretty slick. it has different files for different languages, and in the vimrc f2 f3 etc are mapped to switch files. personally i've only tried out the C/C++ file and it's sweet. i just wish he had ones for ruby, python, and java. looks like i'll have to write those ](*,)

Well, one of the things I like about vi is that I don't have to lug about a profile for it like I do with Emacs. But thanks for the info.

[Bubbling Zombie]

i prefer Vim. Or kate when i'm in KDE.

[psychic]

I just love the fact i do not have to reach to far-away corners of my keyboard when using vim. Actually you do not have to move your hands off the alpha-numeric field.\\:D/

The only thing i do dislike is the place of <esc>, but when you swap <ctrl> and <caps-lock> key-codes you can do a <caps-lock><]> and you dont have to reach that either. :-\" :)

[Sniffer]

I prefer Vim as well....don't like emacs.....and don't like kate and KDE either :)

But that is my taste.

[eiolf]

Hmmmm...I am the onlyone who likes pico?

[jerome bettis]

Hmmmm...I am the onlyone who likes pico?
yes

if you're a programmer you _need_ to look at vim and emacs.

[Mlehliw]

The only thing i do dislike is the place of <esc>, but when you swap <ctrl> and <caps-lock> key-codes you can do a <caps-lock><]> and you dont have to reach that either. :-\" :)
I use <caps-lock><c> so i don't even have to reach for that bracket.

[judabuddhist]

I mostly use vim, except for java, where I use eclipse. It may be big and bloated, but so is java. Maybe I should try out emacs seriously at some point, but it's hard to bother when no matter where I am I have vi at my fingertips

[SNo0py]

I mostly use vim, except for java, where I use eclipse. It may be big and bloated, but so is java. Maybe I should try out emacs seriously at some point, but it's hard to bother when no matter where I am I have vi at my fingertips
Hi out there! Eclipse is one of the best Java-Applications around there - it is much faster than other applications and it looks much better... the default Java-look is really ugly.
And you can't really compare an IDE (Eclipse) with a small text-editor (vim).... that's unfair!