Ask HN: Why is vim considered a better editor in comparison to emacs? - arpangupta
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znpy
It isn't.

Emacs vs Vim is more a matter of personal taste.

I have used both, here are my opinions.

Note: I was a vim user that switched to emacs.

Vi/Vim:

=============

It _IS_ worth learning because it is the de-facto standard editor on most unix
and unix-like systems, and most of the times it comes preinstalled. The basics
can be learnt in half an hour or so.

The nice thing about vim is that it fits very well in the Unix environment
doing basically one thing and doing it fairly well.

Please note that vi and vim are two different things: 'vi' is more of a family
of editors, with vim being the most widely used one. Most vi-like editors
share the same keybinding and stuff, and you can use most using the same of
keybindings and concepts.

One of the things where vim falls short is that its scripting language is
quite crappy, and it's quite a PITA to work with. Plus once you learn it, it
is quite useless outside vim.

GNU Emacs

=============

GNU Emacs is a radically different approach to editing text and it resembles
one of the early lisp machines: you have a bunch of functions lying around and
you call and compose them as you need them.

The learning curve is quite steep but it is very flexible, it has a reasonably
nice scripting language that you can use even outside (well, most of the
syntax).

The thing I like about emacs is that it gives you a coherent environment to do
most of your things, and a scripting language to customize most of its aspect.

So what?

=============

Well, nothing. Try them both and stick with what you like.

I think it is really worth to learn at least the basics of both.

To be fairly honest, I have some pain points with both of them... But that
would be OT, and better suited for another post :)

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gallexme
who says that vim is better than emacs? both are equally good in their "world"
its just a matter of user preferences more people like vims shortcuts

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macmac
Don't feed the troll.

