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Emacs is for people who want to have a versatile do-it-all environment. Vim is for people who want to process text efficiently. Typically, software with such

Emacs is for people who want to have a versatile do-it-all environment. Vim is for people who want to process text efficiently. Typically, software with such a high level of integration sucks. It's a collection of mediocre tools rather than one excellent tool. My combination of Vim + irssi + mutt + ddd is greater than any emacs tools as they are cherry picked to be the best at their job rather than the most integrated. I know. I binned emacs for them. Emacs is effectively a somewhat less harsh form of vendor lock in.

jrockway 17y ago
Wow, a lot of unsubstantiated "facts" to justify your personal preference. Let me guess, the color green is better than the color orange because your eyes are more sensitive to green? After all, it's your favorite right? Anyway, I disagree on your comments about integration. Vim, irssi, mutt, and ddd all use separate keybinding semantics. Switch programs, and everything you know about using your software is thrown out the window -- now you are doing something totally new. Repeat several times a day. Integration affords the possibilities for greater reuse. I wrote an extension for managing "projects". Thanks to eshell, I can easily manage my projects from the command-line now, not just when I am editing files in emacs. (And, there are no hacks involved; no forking a process every time I want my editor to open another file in the project, as would be required if you wanted to do this with vi and bash.) It's a collection of mediocre tools rather than one excellent tool. Maybe the stuff you write is...
- smithjchris 17y ago
  How can it be a fact if it's not substantiated? It's all down to opinion, which I chose to share. Now some replies which are all my opinion again. a) All my keybindings are approximately vim-like. Mutt uses vim as an editor. I use the mouse for ddd (nail me to a cross for my sins). irssi mainly involves: type stuff, whack enter. b) Blue is my favourite colour (particularly oceandeep.vim). c) Revelation: I avoid "project management" tools. That is what the filesystem and the related tools are for. d) Regarding forking, UNIX was designed to be small utilities working together to build systems greater than the sum of it's parts, not one monolithic environment. Otherwise they wouldn't have added the fork() syscall would they? Hence, in vim, whack bang (!) and type a shell command. Pipe stuff in, get stuff out. e) I admit, my writing style is terrible. ..zzZZ
rpdillon 17y ago
The classic "Unix is many small tools and Emacs is one big tool" argument is well known, but rarely substantiated. Emacs tools are not any more tightly coupled because they're written in Emacs Lisp than your tools are because they're written in C. In fact, just as all your tools run in a terminal, all my Emacs tools run in buffers (in Emacs). Speaking loosely, Emacs is the embodiment of Unix: it has many tools written by the community, some of which are installed by default, and you can choose which you want to run that best suit your needs. "Integration" doesn't really fit into the picture. For example, Emacs has both ERC and rcirc. I use ERC, but my point is that there are choices. Emacs has several mail readers (Wanderlust, GNUs, mew, etc) and several terminal emulators. Eshell provides one type of feel, treating your shell as a buffer. Term provides a more classic terminal emulator feel, when you don't want to treat your term like a text editing session. As to your "! is text in, text out", try M-! in Emacs. I daresay Emacs has fairly robust system integration as well. I have run irssi from term buffers for fun. Even more ironic is running vi in a term buffer. In short, it may be more useful for you to think of Emacs as a replacement for your terminal emulator than as a replacement for vi.

jrockway 17y ago

Wow, a lot of unsubstantiated "facts" to justify your personal preference. Let me guess, the color green is better than the color orange because your eyes are more sensitive to green? After all, it's your favorite right? Anyway, I disagree on your comments about integration. Vim, irssi, mutt, and ddd all use separate keybinding semantics. Switch programs, and everything you know about using your software is thrown out the window -- now you are doing something totally new. Repeat several times a day. Integration affords the possibilities for greater reuse. I wrote an extension for managing "projects". Thanks to eshell, I can easily manage my projects from the command-line now, not just when I am editing files in emacs. (And, there are no hacks involved; no forking a process every time I want my editor to open another file in the project, as would be required if you wanted to do this with vi and bash.) It's a collection of mediocre tools rather than one excellent tool. Maybe the stuff you write is...

smithjchris 17y ago
How can it be a fact if it's not substantiated? It's all down to opinion, which I chose to share. Now some replies which are all my opinion again. a) All my keybindings are approximately vim-like. Mutt uses vim as an editor. I use the mouse for ddd (nail me to a cross for my sins). irssi mainly involves: type stuff, whack enter. b) Blue is my favourite colour (particularly oceandeep.vim). c) Revelation: I avoid "project management" tools. That is what the filesystem and the related tools are for. d) Regarding forking, UNIX was designed to be small utilities working together to build systems greater than the sum of it's parts, not one monolithic environment. Otherwise they wouldn't have added the fork() syscall would they? Hence, in vim, whack bang (!) and type a shell command. Pipe stuff in, get stuff out. e) I admit, my writing style is terrible. ..zzZZ

rpdillon 17y ago

The classic "Unix is many small tools and Emacs is one big tool" argument is well known, but rarely substantiated. Emacs tools are not any more tightly coupled because they're written in Emacs Lisp than your tools are because they're written in C. In fact, just as all your tools run in a terminal, all my Emacs tools run in buffers (in Emacs). Speaking loosely, Emacs is the embodiment of Unix: it has many tools written by the community, some of which are installed by default, and you can choose which you want to run that best suit your needs. "Integration" doesn't really fit into the picture. For example, Emacs has both ERC and rcirc. I use ERC, but my point is that there are choices. Emacs has several mail readers (Wanderlust, GNUs, mew, etc) and several terminal emulators. Eshell provides one type of feel, treating your shell as a buffer. Term provides a more classic terminal emulator feel, when you don't want to treat your term like a text editing session. As to your "! is text in, text out", try M-! in Emacs. I daresay Emacs has fairly robust system integration as well. I have run irssi from term buffers for fun. Even more ironic is running vi in a term buffer. In short, it may be more useful for you to think of Emacs as a replacement for your terminal emulator than as a replacement for vi.