Everyone says this makes a crazy debate so...

[xequence]

Ive heard people say how crazy the debate of emacs or vi is.

Just wondering, which do you prefer?

Personally, ive never used ether, but emacs sounds cooler and aparently it has more features then some OSes. That just plain sounds cool.

Now, also, people say it will bring on great flame wars. (Dont accually know why, but heh). I hope people here are more civilized then that though.

[BWF89]

I've used Emacs and it has a ton of options and a few games but when I need to edit some text I prefer something lightweight like Notepad because it's not like I'm doing anything major. Neither/Don't care for me.

Edit: and by Emacs I ment GNU Emacs.

[23meg]

For lightweight tasks and quick edits I use gedit and nano, and for everything else Emacs, out of habit; I've never got round to giving vi a thorough try.

[IYY]

I use VI. I'm not gonna say it's better than other editors, but I personally find it to be more comfortable, especially for quick and dirty edits of config files. It's also very comfortable for coding.

[rfruth]

Call me what you want (too late 4 that) but I like pico a.k.a nano https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NanoHowto?highlight=%28nano%29
for quick dirty work :D

[Koobi]

never really used Emacs. i love vi

[fuscia]

i tried emacs for ten minutes, once. i had no clue what it was for.

[DaMasta]

Never used emacs. I like vi. Just need to get better memorization of the commands.

[briancurtin]

vi for everything. i hate typing "sudo gedit blah blah" but people new to linux and computers in general obviously dont know vi to edit their sources list and etc

[bored2k]

emacs, just because jed is based on it.

[poofyhairguy]

Call me what you want (too late 4 that) but I like pico a.k.a nano https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NanoHowto?highlight=%28nano%29
for quick dirty work :D

Me too. I love Pico! Its awesome!

Of course part of my bias might be due to the fact that Nano/Pico is the only CLI editor that I have ever figured out how to exit from! (simple control plus X) Despite the claims that I hate GUIs, when you take away my "X" buttons I am at a loss!

[bored2k]

Me too. I love Pico! Its awesome!

Of course part of my bias might be due to the fact that Nano/Pico is the only CLI editor that I have ever figured out how to exit from! (simple control plus X) Despite the claims that I hate GUIs, when you take away my "X" buttons I am at a loss!
Try jed. It's ^x^c ;).

[ninotob]

I'm hip to nano as well. It has very easy commands, it's fast, and it gets the job done. Emacs is just overkill for me -- like using spreadsheet to add two numbers together. And vi -- I just don't get the whole modal thing. Way overcomplicated.

[endersshadow]

Vi, mainly because I love gVim...such a great text editor...the commands are just second nature to me now :-D

I used Emacs once...it was a bit overkill for me, that's for sure.

[prizrak]

Emacs is very hardcore and featurefull, which makes it real bad for simple stuff :) I prefer VI since its the only CLI one I ever learned :)

[frodon]

nedit for everything at my job. Don't care when i'm at home

[Iandefor]

I tried Emacs once. It scared the hell out of me. I tried vi. It confused me at first, but I got the hang of it pretty quickly, and since I don't do that much work on plaintext, (EG, config files, README's, source code), I don't need the features of Emacs.

[Gustav]

Emacs (I sometimes use gedit but always get irritated when I can't exit with ctrl-x-c)

It's not only good as an editor it also has the only gomoku (five in a row) game I've found for linux.

[truthfatal]

I'll use whatever's handy.

[somuchfortheafter]

going with vim on this one, its simple and fast and vimtutor was a tremendous help when learning

[Clazzy]

I tried vim, got a bit frustrated and went back to nano. My favourite GUI editor is Mousepad, just because it's simple but effective.

[Lord Illidan]

Been using vi ever since my uncle showed me how to get to grips with it. It loads up in milliseconds and is quite easy to use once you get to grips with it. However it does tend to go crazy a bit. Emacs...too cluttered and big!

[SilentCacophony]

Between emacs and vi, I have to go with emacs, because it was one of the first feature-filled editors that I used. This was back in 1988 on an Amiga 500 computer.

That said, I really don't like either. Back in my Amiga days, I really liked the editor that came with a shareware C programming environment called DICE (don't remember the editor's name, though.) TurboText by Oxxi was also quite nice.

These days, I tend to use the simpler editors: nano, leafpad/mousepad, and gedit.

[jpkotta]

Emacs, all the way. I used to use NEdit, which I still think is a great editor. I tried vim for a week, and I'm glad I learned it, but it was just too unintuitive for me.

The great thing about Emacs is that it's so old and so popular. If you have a type of text to edit (C, Perl, LaTeX, etc.), then someone else probably wanted to edit that type of text too, so they created a major mode for it and added all sorts of useful macros. There's a learning curve, and some of the defaults are unintuitive or stupid, but it's overall the best editor I've tried. Plus it works with X or the console.

Emacs Wiki (http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki)

[Squalor]

Call me what you want (too late 4 that) but I like pico a.k.a nano https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NanoHowto?highlight=%28nano%29
for quick dirty work :D

Here's another nano lover. :)

[transactionlogfiller]

Never used emacs. Probably only use 1% of the functionality in vi but it is my editor of choice.

[JeffS]

gEdit or Kate for me, especially gEdit. gEdit is very simple and intuitive (like most Gnome programs), has a good tab system, and complete (and easy) highlight mode.

For the command line I like vi/vim, and it's GUI cousin gVim. Vim has a pretty quick learning curve.

I want to like Emacs, and someday might invest time in learning it and getting productive with it, since it is so powerful and has so many features and so many loyal users. However, up to this point I have found the learning curve to be waaaaay too steep, especially for a text editor. Sure, you can use Emacs as a full IDE, to play games, browse the internet, send email, shine your shoes, etc. But for me that's overkill. If I want to go the full IDE route, I go for NetBeans (for java development), Anjuta/Glade (for GTK/Gnome development), QT-designer/Kdevelop (for KDE development), or Visual C++ or Visual Basic for Windows development. Emacs, as powerful as it is, can't touch those tools for the full IDE experience.

So for editing config files, simple programming, or basic text editing, it's gEdit, Kate, or vim for me.

[bonzodog]

I normally use gedit in GUI mode or Nano/pico in the CLI. They are definately the best and easiest to use.

[majikstreet]

vi because I like vi

[Jason-X]

I like to keep things simple, I use Nano.

[poofyhairguy]

Even though its not the actual cause of the difference, I think that the preference for Nano displays the difference between this community and ....say.... Gentoo or Slackware's.

Not that its a bad thing.

[chimera]

Gedit

[super]

neither

i'm another person that uses nano. and only when i crash my x server and i'm forced to.


Even though its not the actual cause of the difference, I think that the preference for Nano displays the difference between this community and ....say.... Gentoo or Slackware's.

Not that its a bad thing.
heh! :)
that's probably true. i can't write programs and i type at about 25 word per minute. the intricate functions of vi and emacs are completely lost on me! :razz: