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RajeshGoli.com
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Reason :: The holy war of geekdom..
There is a holy war in geekdom, fought by the most esoteric of UNIX hackers. The cause for which the war is being fought must be noble one. It must be something that geeks hold dear, something that they have to do every day of their lives. What is it that an average UNIX geek cannot do without in his daily life? "Editing text", yes you read it right, "Editing text". There were many sides to the editor wars but most editors were killed and there are only two left standing, which brings us to the bone of contention:
Vi(m) Versus Emacs
I will not hide from you, the reader, on which side of the war I fight. But I will give you my reasons. In this bitter turf-war for the holy grail of an editor, I pledge my allegiance to Vim, Yes, VIM RULES!
And why do I like vim? In the first place I like its modal way of operating. I can use keys without holding weird combination of control alt and shift to do meta operations. I am almost a touch typist, so it makes editing text using vim a breeze. With emacs I would have to hold keys to do just about anything other than typing in text, just to get out of the editor I need to type "Control-X Control-C", which is a pain.
Emacs is supposed to be powerful and extensible, with LISP integration. But have the emacs activists taken stock of vim's powerful scripting language and its perl/python integration? I would rather learn python or use perl (I already know it..) than learn LISP. You may call it a personal whim, but I would argue against it citing the practical use of the languages in question.
Now to the things that I CAN do in vim.
- I can seamlessly browse code written in various languages using ctags and cscope.
- I can wildly customize my editor to do all sorts of nifty things using keyboard shortcuts.
- I can do things like search within a function, search within an if-else block
- I can fold parts of code away.
- In fact my gvim is configured to do all of the above and functions like a mini-IDE!
I plan to write a mini how-to on how to get the maximum of your vim for beginners sometime. Till
then, experiment and you'll see why emacs is not for you 
.
Created on 28th July 2005 and modified last on 29th July 2005
1. Emacs: The legend
The comparing vim vs emacs in "editor" world is more analogous to comparing juniper vs
cisco in IP world. vim can be second alternative and growing users, and neverthless to say, the
choice of emacs is first.
CISCO is IP and IP is cisco, so here editor means emacs and emacs means editor
Swami on 29th July 2005
2. Intellisense and vim
In bram's words, "Some kind of intellisense is planned for vim". We can expect to see it
when Vim 7 becomes stable. More reasons to prove that vim rules!
On "use what works for you", I'll say unless you've used vim you haven't discovered
that vim will work best for you yet!
Rajesh Goli on 29th July 2005
3. VIM
May the force be with VIM and nobody else!
Mahendra on 29th July 2005
4. Use what works best for you
my viewpoint is that there can never be a consensus on which tool (Editor, debugger etc) is best. My
idealogy is use what works best for you. For instance some people cant live without intellisense,
some people hate it. Personally i feel intellisense is a huge boost in productivity (no need to go
looking up APIs n stuff). But thatz a different story. from what i know VIM fanatics far outnumber
emacs fanatics. im not much of a unix-editor poweruser but i do look fwd to ur how to on using vim.
certainly will subscribe to a "for dummies" version if there is one .Point is "use what works for you".
Nikhil on 28th July 2005
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