[Gllug] ed vs emacs/vi, was: ed vs emacs, was: OpenMoko Neo Freerunner

Nix nix at esperi.org.uk
Sun May 17 13:39:17 UTC 2009


On 15 May 2009, Joel Bernstein uttered the following:

> On 15 May 2009, at 17:51, general_email at technicalbloke.com wrote:
>> I have to say...
>> Emacs clearly kicks Vim's ass! ;D
>
> Emacs kicks vi's ass, given you're coming from a GUI editor/IDE  
> perspective.
> Vim, or perhaps gvim, suitably configured, is equally good or better.  

Yeah, but it's kind of weird. Emacs's weirdness is confusable with the
way normal editors do things (point/mark can be confused with
'selecting') or is invisible to the casual user (elisp). vi's weirdness,
the modal editing, jumps straight down the newbie's throat as soon as
he tries to type in a single word.

> Unless you want to read your email in your editor. Using either for  
> long will involve learning to install and configure its plugins. 20  
> minutes probably isn't enough for that.

Seconded (though neither has 'plugins' in that sense, Emacs has insane
numbers of extensions. They don't plug into the editor in the sense of
being ancillary, though, they're as much part of the editor and with the
same capabilities as, say, the code that kicks in when you hit return
to move the cursor to the next line).
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