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Emacs and vi are the traditional editors of the programming gurus. But, have any modern editors been able to displace these two in terms of extensibility and text editing productivity?
I know editors such as Eclipse and commercial editors provide language specific advantages such as intellisense and refactoring, though this is not quite what I'm looking for. My question is more along the lines of an innovative editor paradigm at a more general level, such that I can use it for many disparate languages, extend it for other tasks, etc.
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Emacs is easier to learn since it has a more natural interface (for users familiar with GUI-based text editors). Since Vim has different editing modes, beginners find it a little harder to learn.
GNU Emacs has been around for a long time—since 1983—but its continuous development makes it still relevant today. GNU Emacs may not be the oldest interactive text editor for Unix—it's arguably predated or matched by the Vi editor—nor is it the only Emacs in existence.
Vim, the improved version of vi, scored 25.8% in popularity, while Emacs scored a paltry 4.1%. That is a staggering difference. To further gauge popularity, I counted 22,582 questions tagged with vim and 15,667 questions tagged with Emacs on Stack Overflow. You could argue that fewer questions means higher usability.
Love it or hate it, Vim still reigns as one of the most beloved editors to this day and has the ultimate scoreboard taunt: Is the text editor you use entering its fourth decade? In technology, nothing sticks around for long. Vim has been a useful tool for a literal human generation.
Sublime Text is a relatively new and very good editor for Windows.
www.sublimetext.com
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