The Editor War

As someone who isn't a native of Unix-land, I see the great divide: some people choose vi as their text editor of choice and some choose emacs. My belief is that which you choose largely depends on who taught you to use an editor – you adopt their choice and make it your own.

I'm coming to the editor war armed with the internet, but without a guide. How am I supposed to choose between these two? I used each of them briefly and did a little reading, and here's what I found and what I thought:

1) Several of the keys in emacs correspond to keys in the shell, like CTRL-K killing to the end of line. It'd be nice to have a leg up on learning keys for the shell.

2) The biggest thing I saw people complain about when saying why they use vim is startup time. I feel that this isn't as much of an issue as it used to be: “slow” starting emacs starts in less than a second in my VM. Maybe this was a big issue 25 years ago, but not so much now. It'll be even less of an issue in another 10 years.

3) The second biggest thing I saw when people said why they used vim was that emacs had “stuff they didn't need.” For me, this falls pretty directly into “things I don't care about.”

4) You can extend emacs with an emacs-flavored Lisp. I wanted to take another look at Lisp anyway.

5) Vi has modes: either you're changing text or you're not. I'm not used to it, and don't care for it.

OK, so it's clear that I'm going to...wait, what? We're not done? OK.

6) The biggest problem people should have with emacs is the control and alt keys, which are used for everything, so much so that they got sick of typing “Ctrl” and just went with “C”. Save the file? C-x C-s. Exit? C-x C-c.

7) Vi can be extended in different languages, but it looks like you have to recompile it and link them together. I'm not sure how this works yet.

8) It looks like people generally agree that making changes to files is generally quicker in vi.

9) Vi uses Esc to get out of edit mode, which I don't like. It looks like it has Ctrl-] as an alternate key for that.

10) I don't really care about most of the things that I know are built is an extras to emacs, like a news reader. Yeah, in the 80's I would have liked that. Now not so much.

Looking over my list, it seems like emacs is pretty much still the clear winner. Except for one thing: the darn keyboards. All the keyboards I've used have a shift on the right and a shift on the left. Capital A? Right shift. Capital U? Left shift. And all the keyboards I've worked with have the right shift in the same place, or at least close enough that I can use it without thinking too hard.

The Ctrl key is different, though. On some keyboards, the right Ctrl key is here. On others, it's over there. On others, it's gone completely. That means that in order to use emacs effectively when switching computers, I'm going to have to learn to use the left Ctrl key. Ugh. Left Ctrl-x Ctrl-c? Yeah, I'm afraid that's not going to work for me. I'm going to go with vim.

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Update: I've waffled and am going with emacs. I'm going to make my Caps Lock key an extra Ctrl and see how that goes.