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Comment by skytreader | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't waste keystrokes on the classic religious war being waged in this thread so I'm gonna throw my hat in this arena instead. I agree with you---that analogy sucks.

Being able to drive an F1 car comes with excellent financial opportunities. Even if I'm not "on the grid" (i.e., actively competing in the GPs), I can be a test driver. Heck the license required to drive an F1 car opens other doors in itself (maybe in other motorsports, but also allegedly the range of vehicles you can drive).

In contrast, if I am proficient in emacs I am...proficient in emacs. I edit code in a manner that is visually impressive to maybe three persons in the CS department. I'd have an ever-so-slightly deeper connection to RMS than your average CRUD-slinger. I am out of advantages to enumerate and I'm trying very hard.

Maybe text editors are about as similar to cars as apples are to buildings.

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I think the right POV is that Emacs is a text-mode Lisp VM, or at least the remains of one. Whereas vi is just a (great) modal editing interface. They are not comparable.

Actually, vim is not a very good implementation of vi's principles.

Concerning Emacs, as a heavy user I think it needs 4 things to stay relatively popular. I don't think it will be ever super popular, and that's fine:

* Get popular workflows to work with zero configuration. Some packages like AuCTeX, Magit or Notmuch are great at this. But many programming modes require adding too much code to init.el (or .emacs), this code breaks often and it is poorly documented.

* There are too many half-finished packages for some tasks, mostly programming modes. Variety is great, but too much fragmentation is hurting the ecosystem.

* Look at things that other editors are doing better, mostly VS Code. In the past, this approach motivated implementing a package manager (ELPA), which was a huge step forward.

* Get better documentation. It's hard to find up-to-date information for many packages. Besides, the tutorial focuses too much on keybindings and doesn't talk about Emacs core principles. So, to a beginner Emacs looks like a bunch of keystroke tricks that make zero sense.

VI is modal text editor (think JEdit). Emacs is IDE (think Eclipse).

Vim can be upgraded to IDE with plugins, and Emacs can be downgrade to a plain text editor, so they are comparable, but their primary goals are different: Vim focus is on editing of text, while Emacs focus is on integration of editor with tools.

If you need a development environment, then forget about Vim, JEdit, nano, pico, etc. If you need just a text editor, then forget about Emacs, Eclipse, Idea, VSCode, etc.

My eyes roll so hard at mentions of the “religious war” that my eye doctor has had to put them back in their sockets multiple times.

The Vim vs. Emacs “war” meme has far surpassed the supposed rivalry itself; the two programs are so different that you might as well be comparing a, I dunno, a megaphone to a woodchipper. (What, the analogy doesn’t make sense, you say? Well exactly.)

The two programs attract not only people with different temperaments but also people with completely different needs and wants.

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