I use both Emacs and Vim. However, I spend 99% of my time in Emacs, and only 1% in Vim — read on to find out why.
I first heard of the names “Emacs” and “Vim” in the TV Show Silicon Valley when the protagonist Richard was arguing with his new software developer girlfriend about Tabs vs. Spaces (probably not the best topic when you’re trying to get laid).
If you don’t know much about these two editors, this post might not make much sense to you. If you’re interested regardless, I suggest you take a few minutes and read this Wikipedia article first. I will not dive into the differences between these two editors, or compare their advantages and disadvantages, as there are already hundreds of similar blog posts and videos online. Instead, I will focus on my hands-on experiences and subjective opinions about these tools.
FAQ
Before getting into my take on the editor war, let’s start with a few frequently asked questions.
FAQ 1: Should I give up Visual Studio Code and use Emacs or Vim?
No, no one should ever tell you what you should use.
You don’t have to give up Visual Studio Code, because there is nothing wrong with it. Microsoft has done a brilliant job pushing this editor forward, introducing a beautiful user interface now serving as community standard, maintaining a plug-and-play Marketplace, perfecting the integration with Windows Subsystem for Linux, and inventing LSP (Language Server Protocol), which is now widely adopted by almost every editor through plugins and packages, including Emacs and Vim.
FAQ 2: What’s with you Emacs/Vim users, what “eXactLY iS sO goOd” about them?
It’s impossible to explain it in a few words, and I won’t even bother trying. What I will say is, once you grok it, it’s like Christopher Columbus discovering the Americas. You will chuckle at yourself for not learning it sooner.
FAQ 3: Is Emacs/Vim for everyone?
I wish it were, but it isn’t. It takes a massive amount of time and self-hypnotizing perseverance to get through the first few weeks of psychological pain and counter-productivity. The few people I know who’ve tried could not get over this phase.
My subjective take on the Editor War
Vim has condescendingly superior keybindings and hence better text-editing efficiency, while Emacs has the upper hand in pretty much anything else, including better GUI support, greater extensibility, better configuration language, and superior package designs (such as Magit and Org). On top of that, Emacs allows you to completely emulate Vim’s keybindings and its superior text-editing efficiency, and basically anything that you thought Vim is good at.
You might wonder, if Emacs exists, why would anyone still choose Vim over it? The answer is simple: because they never gave Emacs the try it deserves. Go on the internet now and you’ll see blog posts of people sharing their experience of moving from Vim to Emacs. Why is there barely anyone talking about moving from Emacs to Vim? Well, because once you exposed yourself to this brilliantly magical piece of software that is Emacs, there’s no turning back.
A common argument from the Vim community is that Emacs is super heavy. But that’s false: both editors are lightweight by default (at least to today’s standards) and start up in an instance. Whenever you hear people complaining about Emacs being “a kitchen sink” or “bloat”, it’s because its ease of extension oftentimes makes you lose yourself in the sea of packages. And as a new user, it’s easy to think that “more is better”.
So, is Vim completely worthless? No, absolutely not! Vim (or its predecessor, Vi) is ubiquitously installed on nearly any machine I could imagine. When you’re dropped into a foreign command line and need to edit some configuration files buried somewhere deep in the file system, Vim may be your only friend.
At this point you might ask, what would be beneficial to a newbie programmer/developer/CS student?
My recommendation would be the following. Learn to touch type before anything else. Then, learn programming to a decent extent before worrying about which editor to master. In the first couple of months, just use Visual Studio Code or Sublime Text or Atom or whichever IDE your professor or supervisor recommends. Once you’re comfortable with programming and gradually notice that editing speed has become the bottleneck of your coding efficiency, you can start learning Vim.
The beauty of Vim is that it fundamentally changes the way you perceive text editing. You no longer operate on mere characters with your cursor, but rather on text objects like words, sentences, lines, paragraphs, and contents within parentheses, quotes, and tags. You seldom have to touch the mouse again because Vim’s efficient keybindings will help you glide through your coding buffer from one position to another. Having mastered this ubiquitous editor, you will find yourself editing system configuration files with ease and eventually learning more about the computer architecture and structure of your operating system because this terminal editor has opened the doors for you to operate on any system file you wish.
After spending a year or two in Vim, it’d be time for you to try out Emacs, specifically with the Evil Mode package, so that you can re-use all the muscle memories you acquired during your time with Vim, except now in Emacs’ superior computing environment. Again, you might hear some Vim users (cough cough, on the r/vim subreddit) claiming the holy status of their beloved editor and belittling Emacs as a bloated kitchen sink that is slow and useless. Don’t listen to them! They most likely spent only a day or two in Emacs before jumping right back to their comfort zone. There’s a reason that the creator of Python, the creator of Java, the creator of Ruby, the creator of Clojure, the creator of TeX, the creator of Erlang, the author of MySQL, the creator of JavaScript, the founder of WikiLeaks, and the founder of Facebook (yes, Mark Zuckerburg) all used or still use Emacs as their main editor (Reference 1 and Reference 2)
And that reason is simple. Because Emacs is the best editor in the world.
Could you jump straight to Emacs before learning Vim? Well, no one is stopping you, but I believe that the best way to learn Vim bindings is to use Vim. And despite being a die-hard Emacs enthusiast, I must admit that Emacs has inferior (straight-up awful) default hotkeys, and the Vim bindings will blow your mind once you learn it. Bottom line is, use Vim bindings in Emacs. You’ll get the best of both worlds.
Concluding words
In this post, I shared my view on Emacs and Vim, the two subjects in the Editor War. Do take this opinionated article with a (big) grain of salt, as I’m obviously partial to Emacs. Objectively speaking, it doesn’t matter which editor you use — at the end of the day, they’re just tools. The brutal truth is you won’t get paid based on which computing environment you use to accomplish the work. You get paid for how good your work is.