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Comment by cup-of-tea | Hacker News Reader

That's because vim and emacs have different purposes and the choices were not exclusive. I use emacs and even I know enough vim to get around and use it regularly. 25% of people claim to use vim, but for what? Occasional editing of individual files? In contrast, those emacs users almost certainly use emacs for everything.

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This exactly, the guy next to me said yes to Vim (and makes sure to talk shit to me literally every single time I open nano) but he literally used Atom all day long and only uses Vim when editing a file stored on a remote server.

I don't care how you feel about nano, I use it less than .0000000000001% of my development time and it serves its purpose just fine.

Assuming you work 80,000 hours in your career:

80000(.0000000000001/100)60*60 = 2.88e-7 seconds spent in nano in your lifetime

[ I know it's an exaggeration :^) ]

This is my understanding as well. I “use” vim a few times a year for the past 30 years using only a half dozen commands (xaiwqyp). But I never use emacs other than playing around once a decade or so.

To get a good vi v emacs question you’d want to ask “what is your primary text editing environment?” Or something like that.

I think your point stands, in that there are probably many casual users of Vim who inflated that number. However, I'd like to point out there are many of us, like myself, for whom vim usage is more than "occasional editing of individual files."

Sure, but if you were to count people who have gone "all in" on vim I don't think it would be that much higher than emacs. I've never actually met a serious vim user, but I've seen plenty of emacs use in academia.

I work in an Linux heavy company with open source core product. Quite a few developers use vim as their IDE and all the ops don't really use anything else.

I'm in the system files / remote box camp regarding vim, tho.

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