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0 pointsabjKT26nO86y ago0 comments

Disclaimer: I'm a long-time Vim user who can't stand editing text without the modal editing paradigm anymore.

Emacs is a competition to Vim, because it has a couple things that Vim does not have:

1. It can understand that a certain part of a file is written in one language and another in another language; and then give you appropriate syntax highlighting, indentation etc. in these specific parts. Vim can't do that.

2. It is an actual GUI application as opposed to GVim which is basically a terminal with vim and a toolbar. It (Emacs) can render proportional fonts, which is really nice when you edit org/LaTeX documents.

3. Its scripting language is a lot nicer to work with.

For these reasons, whenever I can, I use Emacs with evil-mode. For the occasional editing of a file on a server or an embedded device I will still fire up vim (or vi in the latter case, since then vim will usually not be available). I encourage you to try it.

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earenndil6y ago

> [Emacs] can understand that a certain part of a file is written in one language and another in another language; and then give you appropriate syntax highlighting, indentation etc. in these specific parts. Vim can't do that.

Sure it can! Here[1]'s an example of someone using it for html embedded in heredocs.

> [Emacs'] scripting language is a lot nicer to work with.

This is not a fundamental limitation. E.G. neovim uses lua. (I'm not counting python and lua embedded in vim, because afaik they're a total pain to work with.)

I actually recently started transitioning from vim to emacs recently, but I don't think any of your arguments in favour of it are particularly strong. I do, however, agree that vim and emacs are at the cutting-edge of text editing, possibly along with some more niche editors like vis, sam, and kakoune.

1: https://forum.dlang.org/post/bvznmyneecpwgrxmgnby@forum.dlan...

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