Emacs vs. Vim 2026: 24.3% vs. 8% Usage, 20x Memory Gap | Hacker News Reader

Emacs vs. Vim 2026: 24.3% vs. 8% Usage, 20x Memory Gap

tech-insider.org

11 pointspir8life4me10 comments

> SSH-only server administration: Vim’s sub-second startup and tiny memory footprint make it the default choice for editing config files on remote boxes, containers, and minimal Linux images where every extra process matters. It’s also nearly guaranteed to already be installed, since most base Linux and macOS images ship Vim or vi by default, unlike Emacs, which almost always requires a separate install step.

That's one way to do it. A better way to accomplish this with emacs is to use tramp mode which uses ssh as a tunnel to edit remote files in a local emacs instance. It just needs ssh access and doesn't require emacs to be installed remotely.

yea, vim doesn't have that, and you don't have to check if vim/emacs is installed on the remote box. just use tramp and if you have ssh access to the files, so does emacs.

In that situation I’d rather use sshfs and whatever editor I’m fancying the most for the job.

How do you escalate up from your user to make changes to root owned files? Or do you ssh in as root?

When I used to do this, I bound 'sudo-find-file to a key, then called that to re-open as root.

I suspect that this may be an example in the tramp docs, as I definitely wasn't knowledgeable enough to figure it out for myself.

I tend to ssh in as root, but TRAMP also supports escalating with su, sudo, or sudoedit (or doas).

LONG LIVE EMACS *raises fist*!!! I still remember that old "Eighty Megabytes And Continuously Swapping" adage, but now I'm looking at my system monitor and I see several Claude instances, which can only have so much text loaded at once 'cuz context window size limit, competing with the sole Emacs instance, which has several dozen buffers on various projects open. It's wild.

That being said, I actually haven't edited anything for a while; nowadays Emacs is more of a viewer when I want to check something in a project. But actually Emacs is still fairly central to my flow as all my projects use an org file for their writeup, and that includes issue tracking, and so I have an org-edit script (communicates with an Emacs instance instead of editing the file directly) and org-issues skill that ensures that file is kept updated by Claude.

About 800ms - 2s startup time for emacs. I run it as as systemd service so it's only started once.

hyperfine 'emacsclient -n -r file' gives me only 15ms on average

TIL Vim Script. OMG. LOL.

I asked Grok compile some elisp to Vim Script. It was possible but weird. Grok says it is not a language perse but ed-primitives with some add-ons like function! .

Or perhaps AI code generation will "kill" both editors.

Why bother learning any editor when you do not need to write code, and there is no reason to enter

gg=G``zz

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