Differences between Emacs and Vim

Question

(the text below is my opinion, it should not be taken as fact or an insult)

With Emacs you are expected to have it open 24/7 and live inside the program, almost everything you do can be done from there. You write your own extensions, use it for note-taking, organization, games, programming, shell access, file access, listening to music, web browsing. It takes weeks and weeks till you will be happy with it and then you will learn new stuff all the time. You will be annoyed when you don't have access to it and constantly change your config. You won't be able to use other peoples emacs versions easily and it won't just be installed. It uses Lisp, which is great. You can make it into anything you want it to be. (anything, at all)

With Vim, it's almost always pre-installed. It's fast. You open up a file do a quick edit and then quit. You can work with the basic setup if you are on someone else's machine. It's not quite so editable, but it's still far better than most text editors. It recognizes that most of the time you are reading/editing not typing and makes that portion faster. You don't suffer from emacs pinkie. It's not so infuriating. It's easier to learn.

Even though I use Emacs all day every day (and love it) unless you intend to spend a lot of time in the program you choose I would pick vim

Vim is not a shell. And it does not communicate well with subprocesses. This is nearly by design, whereas in Emacs, these elements are included by design. This means that some stuff, like embedding a debugger or an interpreter (yielding a sort of IDE), is difficult in Vim.

Also, Emacs shortcuts are mainly accessed through modifiers, and obviously the Vim interface is famously modal, giving access to an absurd amount of direct keys for manipulation.

Emacs used to be the only editor of the two that was programmable, and while Vim has a lot of weird levels to its programmability, with the addition of Python and Ruby bindings (and more, I forget), Vim is also programmable in most ways you'd care for.

I use Vim, and I'm fairly happy with it.

Vim:

• better as a simple editor (fewer keys required for simple tasks)
• more active scripting community - internal language: vimscript
• one central repository of scripts, plugins, color schemes, ...
• also extensible in python, ruby
• can be made portable (emacs has some problems with that)

Emacs:

• non modal by default (most of today's editors have taken this approach). Though there is evil-mode which emulates vim behavior.
• more powerful language for extending it (elisp is a full blown language, and in emacs you can practically redefine everything; while in vim you cannot redefine build in functions of the editor. On the downside, vimscript is relatively similar to today's dynamic languages while elisp doesn't resemble pretty much anything)
• more extendible
• excellent support for GNU tools (the bunch of them)

Personally, I prefer vim - it is small, does what it's supposed to do, and when I wish a full blown IDE I open VS. Emacs's approach of being an editor which wants to be an IDE (or should I say, an OS), but is not quite, is IMHO, outdated. In the old days having a email client, ftp client, tetris, ... whatnot in one package (emacs) made some sense ... nowadays, it doesn't anymore.

Both are however a topic of religious discussions among the programmer and superuser community users, and in that respect, both are excellent for starting flame wars if put in contact (in the same sentence / question).

If you are looking for an objective analysis of both the editors, look at their origins and the philosophy behind their respective designs. Think, which one would suit you better and learn it (and learn it and learn it, because it takes time before you being to discover its true utility as against any IDE). An Introduction to Display Editing with Vi was written by Bill Joy and Mark Horton and he explains why he choose modal design and rationale for various key strokes ( it helps me to remember that CTRL-W +W (will switch to next Window and it will same for CTRL W+ CTRL W, just in case you held the CTRL key for a longer duration.

Here is a link to Emacs timeline and has the reference to Multics Emacs paper. Hereis RMS paper on Emacs, where I see the stress is on a programmable text editor (even way back in 1981 and before).

I have not read the emacs papers, but have read Bill Joy's vi paper a couple of times. Both are old, but still you will get the philosophy and you might choose to use the current tool (vim 7.x or emacs 25?)

Edit: I forgot to mention that it takes patience and imagination to read both these papers as it takes you back in time while reading it. But it is worth.

1. Vim was always faster to start up than Emacs. I'm saying that on any machine, out-of-the-box installs of Vim will start up faster than out-of-the-box installs of Emacs. And I tend to think that after a moderate amount of customisation of either one, Vim will still start up faster than Emacs.

2. After that, the other practical difference was Emacs' modes. They make your life tremendously easier when editing XML, C/C++/Java/whatever, LaTeX, and most popular languages you can think of. They make you want to keep the editor open for long sessions and work.

All in all, I'll say that Vim pulls you to it for short, fast editing tasks; while Emacs encourages you to dive in for long sessions.

VI is always available and will run on the most crippled, single user mode, broken graphics, no keymap, slow link machine - so it's worth knowing how to edit simple files in it just for sysadmin tasks.

Emacs is a complete user interface in an editor. The idea is that you fire up Emacs when you start the machine and never leave it. It's possible to have thousands of sessions present.

Whether learning the capabilities of Emacs are worth it compared to using a GUI editor/IDE and using something like python/awk/etc for extra tasks is up to you.

I'm a full-blown Emacs fan-boy, but I knew VI long before I knew Emacs. That said, I make all of my people learn VI because it's always available, everywhere. Can't go wrong with either one of them.