Text editors, Emacs vs Vim

Over the years I have used numerous programming editors and IDE (integrated development environment) programs. At the beginning of this year I decided that it was time to pick one text editor and master it. I decided to take a look at two long time players on the text editing field that are available on most platforms and then choose one to master… I am talking about Emacs and Vim.

I started by reading online resources on both editors, and buying and reading a PDF book on each editor from O’Reilly. The books I bought are: Learning GNU Emacs and Leaning the Vi and Vim Editors. I found both books informative and pleasant reads.

As I went on I found that both editors more or less have the same capabilities (and extremely extensible, Vim through Vimscript and Emacs through Lisp), and that choosing between them really is a matter of personal preference. I settled for Vim as my editor of choice, below are a couple of reasons why:

• I prefer Vim’s modal editing (It is possible to achieve this in Emacs as well, if you really want it…)
• Vim has less things that I don’t need than Emacs does (Emacs has a calendar and a set of mini games per example).
• One of my colleagues at work also uses Vim (and because we both use it, we can share Vimmy things, such as Vim scripts and macros)