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Vim or Emacs: Which text editor do you prefer?

Posted by bob on · 9 comments
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It may be 2016, but among many developers and system administrators, the editor war is still alive and well. Vim (and vi) or Emacs: Both have strong followings, and of course, plenty of people use something else entirely. Which do you prefer? read more

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Comments (9)

dotmatrix ·
I have never worked on any modern *nix system that did not include vi. It's always there. It's simple to use.
penguinist ·
vi is also my go-to choice. It is simple and fast over an ssh connection to a remote system, and if you have to climb the learning curve on an editor vi is a good choice.

When doing program development, I also use vi for quick stuff, more advanced python programs might need spyder with its integrated pdb debugger.
flufferbeer ·
The only radio button choices in the title are vim and emacs. Seems to me if they had included ANY text editor, that the popular Linux GUI text editors gedit and maybe leafpad would run neck-and-neck with the CLI text-editor opponents mentioned of the title.

2c
penguinist ·
gedit, leafpad and geany are fine editors if you are only working locally and for many people that is the use case, however for those of us who hop back and forth between an X11 screen and a remote ssh shell, the cli editors rule the game.
mbaehrlxer ·
i started with emacs, but working as a sysadmin forced vi on me, because, it is always there.

i do like the composability of vi commands. that is something no other editor can do...

greetings, eMBee.
cybertao ·
I've always liked nano and have been pleased to see its uptake as a default install for a number of distributions over the years.
gus3 ·
For me, it actually depends on the file I'm editing. For Makefiles I prefer emacs; other source formats I prefer Nedit, or vim if Nedit doesn't know what language it's in. And for general correspondence I use LibreOffice. ;-)

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