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Comment by r00k | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, this was one of emacs' defaults that caused me to give it up and go back to vim. Also being forced to type out 'yes' completely to quit.

Vim is the kind of editor that never makes you type three characters where one would do. Or delete some text and then paste it back as the only means to 'copy.' It's about efficiency down to its bones.

Now, I'm well aware these things are customizable in emacs, but they're shipped as defaults. This implies the community thinks they're best, and belies a mentality that I just can't get with ("more keystrokes? no problem").

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> This implies the community thinks they're best

In some cases, it just serves as a reminder about Stallman's incredible stubbornness. (transient-mark-mode, for one) The defaults are easy to change, at least.

Also, not to feed the trolls, but it seems like with Emacs vs. vim arguments, people are usually talking past each other. In general, it sounds like Emacs users are happy to have an easily extensible environment, and the vim users enjoy using such a terse and efficient text editor.

There's nothing contradictory there!

An editor could do both, there just hasn't been a sufficiently popular synthesis of their strong points, yet. (Right?)

Well, there's VIPER...

But as a vim user, I like the way that vim works with minimal configuration. Yes, I could configure emacs to behave any way I'd like -- in fact, I generally like doing that sort of thing -- but as long as I'm really configuring my editor, I don't want to start with a horribly messy system like Emacs (and Elisp -- dynamic scoping?). Not to mention that I can't stand the default keybindings, and all sorts of extensions aren't quite as friendly to set up once you've deviated from the defaults significantly (such as in VIPER).

Vim may be a "temporary" solution for me in that it's not as configurable as I'd like (I don't like Vimscript either, but I don't use it!). However, as "temporary" solutions go, it's very good at what it does (editing text, and that's it). I wouldn't dream of running an IRC client inside it, though.

I agree with you on pretty much all counts, actually. While one can use viper, most modes people have written follow the conventions for Emacs keybindings, so it's ultimately pretty futile.

I really think it's more that people have one mind or the other about things.

Some people like to easily have their editor do a lot of stuff for them, some people would rather do a lot of stuff in their editor easily. There are vi modes for emacs and vim has a pretty good scripting language for add-ons (ain't no emacs though).

I've heard of at least one project that aims to do both, but that one's written in Haskell, so you'll probably not have all that many people using it anyhow.

(fset 'yes-or-no-p 'y-or-n-p)

Emacs is not Vim, and when people start to get that they can essentially change anything they want they actually start to enjoy emacs. And Defaults are almost never a best thought opinion but a compromise.

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