Vim is now a more popular topic than emacs on HN | Hacker News Reader

Vim is now a more popular topic than emacs on HN

hntrends.jerodsanto.net

44 pointsdiggan29 comments

Vim is also more popular than sex, http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=vim%2C+emacs%2C+sex, but I am still not going to use vim!

If emacs users bothered to read its manual[1] maybe sex wouldn't be so unpopular

[1] http://sqzm14.ust.hk/sexman.html

As an emacs lover, I could not let this pass uncommented. I have to confess that I've given vim more than a look lately (I even wrote a review about vim for iPad), after reading about some new stuff here. Curiously enough, the stuff people are talking about vim here lately (except for VIM adventures) are (for example, one that was discussed several times) org-mode clones.

Oh, I'm definitely switching now! :)

That is an obnoxiously long animation to get to the most relevant data (the current data).

I find the animation quite good, it adds to the dramatic affect and builds anticipation on the final result. That is if hntrends is used for contests.

Emacs is like "Linux on the Desktop", it will never dominate the market, but the people that love it... will keep writing lambda calculus interpreters in it...

I don't think I'd read a trend into that.

Emacs had a short burst of popularity that's reverted to the mean. Vim's had a little uptick in the last few months, but nothing to write home about.

Plot it on a different scale and you'll see that it's just noise; http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=vim%2C+emacs%2C+python

hmm.. I will start worry when the number of commits to the Emacs source tree fall behind of VIM.

http://www.ohloh.net/p/emacs/commits/summary

http://www.ohloh.net/p/vim/commits/summary

Just switched from MacVim to Emacs as my main text editor. Org-mode is very powerful for outlines and tasks. For a while I stayed with Vim because it's lighter on system resources, there are nice plugins like a lightweight Org-mode clone and VimWiki... and it's hot in the Ruby/Rails community. But the 60 or so MB for Emacs is lightweight compared to mobile and desktop standards now and has features that blow any editor out of the water. No reason to stay with Vim (except on iPad). Reportedly Emacs also runs on Android... so with Evil mode and Emacs I keep all my Vi bindings and have the best of all worlds: calculator, calendar, planning, games, integrated browser, emacsspeak screenreader etc. The only thing I miss is a nice Cocoa file tree browser next to the GnuEmacs editor window.

>nice Cocoa file tree browser next to the GnuEmacs editor window

Have you tried M-x speedbar?

Hi Fein, thanks for the tip. I noticed the speedbar tree, and it's adequate.. but I'd rather like a nice Cocoa tree like in Alloy's MacVim port https://github.com/alloy/macvim/wiki/Screenshots instead of a NERDtree like speedbar.

Ahh, then what you want is ECB.

http://ecb.sourceforge.net/

and a screenie: http://kasun04.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/emacs1.jpg

I think we can use this to infer how many programmers who actually work for a living are contributing to HN:

http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=vim%2C+emacs%2C+visual+stu...

;)

I'm sure the decline in emacs is mainly due to RSI :)

VS user here. I'm genuinely surprised that it's trending that low.

Note that this could be caused by a number of things. A couple thoughts:

It gives equal weight to submissions and comments. There could be a lot more vim submissions from a handful of contributors, but they may be less likely to get the votes to bring them to the attention of HN.

Another possibility is the increase in popularity of other text editors, namely Sublime Text:

http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=emacs%2C+vim%2C+sublime

It could be that Sublime Text stories garner more comments from vim users for some reason.

It's more popular also according to Google http://www.google.com/trends/?q=vim,+emacs but the word "vim" has various meanings.

When searched on Google, vim can be any of these things (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vim), and many more. Notice that Korea is the top searcher, and Vim could very well be a popular Korean name.

In Japan 'Emacs' seems to rock too :p

Sensationally meaningless?

I have tried very hard to get with vim and really learning it but I have always end up switch back to emacs for 'real' programming.....

I think this correlates closely with the observed decline in civility and quality discourse on HN :)

As an Emacs user this doesn't really scare me, but I do know and always defend that Emacs and Vim are the best and only two decent editors out there.

as a lifelong vim user, what is emacs?

Emacs is something that Vim aspires to become one day :)

vim is more popular than sex, god, and cats. http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=vim%2C+emacs%2C+sex%2C+god...

apparently god and emacs are positively correlated! http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=emacs%2C+god

Round one: fight! ding ding ding

LIES!!!ONE!!!!

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