

The Oldest Rivalry in Software: Vi vs. Emacs - ForHackernews
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/05/oldest_software_rivalry_emacs_and_vi_two_text_editors_used_by_programmers.single.html

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pmoriarty
This article is just about what you'd expect from a non-technical blog writing
about something complex and technical that its readers don't understand and
have had no exposure to.

It's filled with inaccuracies, misunderstandings and oversimplifications, from
referring to vim as vi to claiming that _" even the biggest Vi detractor will
not dispute that it's faster than Emacs"_.

In the above claim, the author is probably talking about vim, not vi, and he's
probably referring only to startup time, not to anything else. On modern
systems any difference (if there is one) in startup time isn't noticeable --
especially if you run emacs in server mode and use emacsclient (of if you just
keep emacs running).

Startup time just really isn't an issue for most users these days. Much more
of an issue is default keybindings (emacs and vim are hugely different here,
but the emacs can emulate vim keybindings quite well with evil[1]), the
various available plugins available for both editors, default scripting
languages (vimscript vs elisp), and the amount of time you have to dedicate to
learning and customizing both editors.

[1] -
[http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil](http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil)

